Plato's Timaeus — The Creation of the World

Of all the writings of Plato the Timaeus is the most obscure and

repulsive to the modern reader, and has nevertheless had the

greatest influence over the ancient and mediaeval world. The

obscurity arises in the infancy of physical science, out of the

confusion of theological, mathematical, and physiological

notions, out of the desire to conceive the whole of nature

without any adequate knowledge of the parts, and from a greater

perception of similarities which lie on the surface than of

differences which are hidden from view. To bring sense under the

control of reason; to find some way through the mist or labyrinth

of appearances, either the highway of mathematics, or more

devious paths suggested by the analogy of man with the world, and

of the world with man; to see that all things have a cause and

are tending towards an end—this is the spirit of the ancient

physical philosopher. He has no notion of trying an experiment

and is hardly capable of observing the curiosities of nature

which are ‘tumbling out at his feet,’ or of interpreting even the

most obvious of them. He is driven back from the nearer to the

more distant, from particulars to generalities, from the earth to

the stars. He lifts up his eyes to the heavens and seeks to guide

by their motions his erring footsteps. But we neither appreciate

the conditions of knowledge to which he was subjected, nor have

the ideas which fastened upon his imagination the same hold upon

us. For he is hanging between matter and mind; he is under the

dominion at the same time both of sense and of abstractions; his

impressions are taken almost at random from the outside of

nature; he sees the light, but not the objects which are revealed

by the light; and he brings into juxtaposition things which to us

appear wide as the poles asunder, because he finds nothing

between them. He passes abruptly from persons to ideas and

numbers, and from ideas and numbers to persons,—from the heavens

to man, from astronomy to physiology; he confuses, or rather does

not distinguish, subject and object, first and final causes, and

is dreaming of geometrical figures lost in a flux of sense. He

contrasts the perfect movements of the heavenly bodies with the

imperfect representation of them (Rep.), and he does not always

require strict accuracy even in applications of number and figure

(Rep.). His mind lingers around the forms of mythology, which he

uses as symbols or translates into figures of speech. He has no

implements of observation, such as the telescope or microscope;

the great science of chemistry is a blank to him. It is only by

an effort that the modern thinker can breathe the atmosphere of

the ancient philosopher, or understand how, under such unequal

conditions, he seems in many instances, by a sort of inspiration,

to have anticipated the truth.

The influence with the Timaeus has exercised upon posterity is

due partly to a misunderstanding. In the supposed depths of this

dialogue the Neo-Platonists found hidden meanings and connections

with the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, and out of them they

elicited doctrines quite at variance with the spirit of Plato.

Believing that he was inspired by the Holy Ghost, or had received

his wisdom from Moses, they seemed to find in his writings the

Christian Trinity, the Word, the Church, the creation of the

world in a Jewish sense, as they really found the personality of

God or of mind, and the immortality of the soul. All religions

and philosophies met and mingled in the schools of Alexandria,

and the Neo-Platonists had a method of interpretation which could

elicit any meaning out of any words. They were really incapable

of distinguishing between the opinions of one philosopher and

another— between Aristotle and Plato, or between the serious

thoughts of Plato and his passing fancies. They were absorbed in

his theology and were under the dominion of his name, while that

which was truly great and truly characteristic in him, his effort

to realize and connect abstractions, was not understood by them

at all. Yet the genius of Plato and Greek philosophy reacted upon

the East, and a Greek element of thought and language overlaid

and partly reduced to order the chaos of Orientalism. And kindred

spirits, like St. Augustine, even though they were acquainted

with his writings only through the medium of a Latin translation,

were profoundly affected by them, seeming to find ‘God and his

word everywhere insinuated’ in them (August. Confess.)

There is no danger of the modern commentators on the Timaeus

falling into the absurdities of the Neo-Platonists. In the

present day we are well aware that an ancient philosopher is to

be interpreted from himself and by the contemporary history of

thought. We know that mysticism is not criticism. The fancies of

the Neo-Platonists are only interesting to us because they

exhibit a phase of the human mind which prevailed widely in the

first centuries of the Christian era, and is not wholly extinct

in our own day. But they have nothing to do with the

interpretation of Plato, and in spirit they are opposed to him.

They are the feeble expression of an age which has lost the power

not only of creating great works, but of understanding them. They

are the spurious birth of a marriage between philosophy and

tradition, between Hellas and the East—(Greek) (Rep.). Whereas

the so-called mysticism of Plato is purely Greek, arising out of

his imperfect knowledge and high aspirations, and is the growth

of an age in which philosophy is not wholly separated from poetry

and mythology.

A greater danger with modern interpreters of Plato is the

tendency to regard the Timaeus as the centre of his system. We do

not know how Plato would have arranged his own dialogues, or

whether the thought of arranging any of them, besides the two

‘Trilogies’ which he has expressly connected; was ever present to

his mind. But, if he had arranged them, there are many

indications that this is not the place which he would have

assigned to the Timaeus. We observe, first of all, that the

dialogue is put into the mouth of a Pythagorean philosopher, and

not of Socrates. And this is required by dramatic propriety; for

the investigation of nature was expressly renounced by Socrates

in the Phaedo. Nor does Plato himself attribute any importance to

his guesses at science. He is not at all absorbed by them, as he

is by the IDEA of good. He is modest and hesitating, and

confesses that his words partake of the uncertainty of the

subject (Tim.). The dialogue is primarily concerned with the

animal creation, including under this term the heavenly bodies,

and with man only as one among the animals. But we can hardly

suppose that Plato would have preferred the study of nature to

man, or that he would have deemed the formation of the world and

the human frame to have the same interest which he ascribes to

the mystery of being and not-being, or to the great political

problems which he discusses in the Republic and the Laws. There

are no speculations on physics in the other dialogues of Plato,

and he himself regards the consideration of them as a rational

pastime only. He is beginning to feel the need of further

divisions of knowledge; and is becoming aware that besides

dialectic, mathematics, and the arts, there is another field

which has been hitherto unexplored by him. But he has not as yet

defined this intermediate territory which lies somewhere between

medicine and mathematics, and he would have felt that there was

as great an impiety in ranking theories of physics first in the

order of knowledge, as in placing the body before the soul.

It is true, however, that the Timaeus is by no means confined to

speculations on physics. The deeper foundations of the Platonic

philosophy, such as the nature of God, the distinction of the

sensible and intellectual, the great original conceptions of time

and space, also appear in it. They are found principally in the

first half of the dialogue. The construction of the heavens is

for the most part ideal; the cyclic year serves as the connection

between the world of absolute being and of generation, just as

the number of population in the Republic is the expression or

symbol of the transition from the ideal to the actual state. In

some passages we are uncertain whether we are reading a

description of astronomical facts or contemplating processes of

the human mind, or of that divine mind (Phil.) which in Plato is

hardly separable from it. The characteristics of man are

transferred to the world-animal, as for example when intelligence

and knowledge are said to be perfected by the circle of the Same,

and true opinion by the circle of the Other; and conversely the

motions of the world-animal reappear in man; its amorphous state

continues in the child, and in both disorder and chaos are

gradually succeeded by stability and order. It is not however to

passages like these that Plato is referring when he speaks of the

uncertainty of his subject, but rather to the composition of

bodies, to the relations of colours, the nature of diseases, and

the like, about which he truly feels the lamentable ignorance

prevailing in his own age.

We are led by Plato himself to regard the Timaeus, not as the

centre or inmost shrine of the edifice, but as a detached

building in a different style, framed, not after the Socratic,

but after some Pythagorean model. As in the Cratylus and

Parmenides, we are uncertain whether Plato is expressing his own

opinions, or appropriating and perhaps improving the

philosophical speculations of others. In all three dialogues he

is exerting his dramatic and imitative power; in the Cratylus

mingling a satirical and humorous purpose with true principles of

language; in the Parmenides overthrowing Megarianism by a sort of

ultra-Megarianism, which discovers contradictions in the one as

great as those which have been previously shown to exist in the

ideas. There is a similar uncertainty about the Timaeus; in the

first part he scales the heights of transcendentalism, in the

latter part he treats in a bald and superficial manner of the

functions and diseases of the human frame. He uses the thoughts

and almost the words of Parmenides when he discourses of being

and of essence, adopting from old religion into philosophy the

conception of God, and from the Megarians the IDEA of good. He

agrees with Empedocles and the Atomists in attributing the

greater differences of kinds to the figures of the elements and

their movements into and out of one another. With Heracleitus, he

acknowledges the perpetual flux; like Anaxagoras, he asserts the

predominance of mind, although admitting an element of necessity

which reason is incapable of subduing; like the Pythagoreans he

supposes the mystery of the world to be contained in number.

Many, if not all the elements of the Pre-Socratic philosophy are

included in the Timaeus. It is a composite or eclectic work of

imagination, in which Plato, without naming them, gathers up into

a kind of system the various elements of philosophy which

preceded him.

If we allow for the difference of subject, and for some growth in

Plato’s own mind, the discrepancy between the Timaeus and the

other dialogues will not appear to be great. It is probable that

the relation of the ideas to God or of God to the world was

differently conceived by him at different times of his life. In

all his later dialogues we observe a tendency in him to personify

mind or God, and he therefore naturally inclines to view creation

as the work of design. The creator is like a human artist who

frames in his mind a plan which he executes by the help of his

servants. Thus the language of philosophy which speaks of first

and second causes is crossed by another sort of phraseology: ‘God

made the world because he was good, and the demons ministered to

him.’ The Timaeus is cast in a more theological and less

philosophical mould than the other dialogues, but the same

general spirit is apparent; there is the same dualism or

opposition between the ideal and actual—the soul is prior to the

body, the intelligible and unseen to the visible and corporeal.

There is the same distinction between knowledge and opinion which

occurs in the Theaetetus and Republic, the same enmity to the

poets, the same combination of music and gymnastics. The doctrine

of transmigration is still held by him, as in the Phaedrus and

Republic; and the soul has a view of the heavens in a prior state

of being. The ideas also remain, but they have become types in

nature, forms of men, animals, birds, fishes. And the attribution

of evil to physical causes accords with the doctrine which he

maintains in the Laws respecting the involuntariness of vice.

The style and plan of the Timaeus differ greatly from that of any

other of the Platonic dialogues. The language is weighty, abrupt,

and in some passages sublime. But Plato has not the same mastery

over his instrument which he exhibits in the Phaedrus or

Symposium. Nothing can exceed the beauty or art of the

introduction, in which he is using words after his accustomed

manner. But in the rest of the work the power of language seems

to fail him, and the dramatic form is wholly given up. He could

write in one style, but not in another, and the Greek language

had not as yet been fashioned by any poet or philosopher to

describe physical phenomena. The early physiologists had

generally written in verse; the prose writers, like Democritus

and Anaxagoras, as far as we can judge from their fragments,

never attained to a periodic style. And hence we find the same

sort of clumsiness in the Timaeus of Plato which characterizes

the philosophical poem of Lucretius. There is a want of flow and

often a defect of rhythm; the meaning is sometimes obscure, and

there is a greater use of apposition and more of repetition than

occurs in Plato’s earlier writings. The sentences are less

closely connected and also more involved; the antecedents of

demonstrative and relative pronouns are in some cases remote and

perplexing. The greater frequency of participles and of absolute

constructions gives the effect of heaviness. The descriptive

portion of the Timaeus retains traces of the first Greek prose

composition; for the great master of language was speaking on a

theme with which he was imperfectly acquainted, and had no words

in which to express his meaning. The rugged grandeur of the

opening discourse of Timaeus may be compared with the more

harmonious beauty of a similar passage in the Phaedrus.

To the same cause we may attribute the want of plan. Plato had

not the command of his materials which would have enabled him to

produce a perfect work of art. Hence there are several new

beginnings and resumptions and formal or artificial connections;

we miss the ‘callida junctura’ of the earlier dialogues. His

speculations about the Eternal, his theories of creation, his

mathematical anticipations, are supplemented by desultory remarks

on the one immortal and the two mortal souls of man, on the

functions of the bodily organs in health and disease, on sight,

hearing, smell, taste, and touch. He soars into the heavens, and

then, as if his wings were suddenly clipped, he walks

ungracefully and with difficulty upon the earth. The greatest

things in the world, and the least things in man, are brought

within the compass of a short treatise. But the intermediate

links are missing, and we cannot be surprised that there should

be a want of unity in a work which embraces astronomy, theology,

physiology, and natural philosophy in a few pages.

It is not easy to determine how Plato’s cosmos may be presented

to the reader in a clearer and shorter form; or how we may supply

a thread of connexion to his ideas without giving greater

consistency to them than they possessed in his mind, or adding on

consequences which would never have occurred to him. For he has

glimpses of the truth, but no comprehensive or perfect vision.

There are isolated expressions about the nature of God which have

a wonderful depth and power; but we are not justified in assuming

that these had any greater significance to the mind of Plato than

language of a neutral and impersonal character... With a view to

the illustration of the Timaeus I propose to divide this

Introduction into sections, of which the first will contain an

outline of the dialogue: (2) I shall consider the aspects of

nature which presented themselves to Plato and his age, and the

elements of philosophy which entered into the conception of them:

(3) the theology and physics of the Timaeus, including the soul

of the world, the conception of time and space, and the

composition of the elements: (4) in the fourth section I shall

consider the Platonic astronomy, and the position of the earth.

There will remain, (5) the psychology, (6) the physiology of

Plato, and (7) his analysis of the senses to be briefly commented

upon: (8) lastly, we may examine in what points Plato approaches

or anticipates the discoveries of modern science.

Socrates begins the Timaeus with a summary of the Republic. He

lightly touches upon a few points,—the division of labour and

distribution of the citizens into classes, the double nature and

training of the guardians, the community of property and of women

and children. But he makes no mention of the second education, or

of the government of philosophers.

And now he desires to see the ideal State set in motion; he would

like to know how she behaved in some great struggle. But he is

unable to invent such a narrative himself; and he is afraid that

the poets are equally incapable; for, although he pretends to

have nothing to say against them, he remarks that they are a

tribe of imitators, who can only describe what they have seen.

And he fears that the Sophists, who are plentifully supplied with

graces of speech, in their erratic way of life having never had a

city or house of their own, may through want of experience err in

their conception of philosophers and statesmen. ‘And therefore to

you I turn, Timaeus, citizen of Locris, who are at once a

philosopher and a statesman, and to you, Critias, whom all

Athenians know to be similarly accomplished, and to Hermocrates,

who is also fitted by nature and education to share in our

discourse.’

HERMOCRATES: ‘We will do our best, and have been already

preparing; for on our way home, Critias told us of an ancient

tradition, which I wish, Critias, that you would repeat to

Socrates.’ ‘I will, if Timaeus approves.’ ‘I approve.’ Listen

then, Socrates, to a tale of Solon’s, who, being the friend of

Dropidas my great-grandfather, told it to my grandfather Critias,

and he told me. The narrative related to ancient famous actions

of the Athenian people, and to one especially, which I will

rehearse in honour of you and of the goddess. Critias when he

told this tale of the olden time, was ninety years old, I being

not more than ten. The occasion of the rehearsal was the day of

the Apaturia called the Registration of Youth, at which our

parents gave prizes for recitation. Some poems of Solon were

recited by the boys. They had not at that time gone out of

fashion, and the recital of them led some one to say, perhaps in

compliment to Critias, that Solon was not only the wisest of men

but also the best of poets. The old man brightened up at hearing

this, and said: Had Solon only had the leisure which was required

to complete the famous legend which he brought with him from

Egypt he would have been as distinguished as Homer and Hesiod.

‘And what was the subject of the poem?’ said the person who made

the remark. The subject was a very noble one; he described the

most famous action in which the Athenian people were ever

engaged. But the memory of their exploits has passed away owing

to the lapse of time and the extinction of the actors. ‘Tell us,’

said the other, ‘the whole story, and where Solon heard the

story.’ He replied—There is at the head of the Egyptian Delta,

where the river Nile divides, a city and district called Sais;

the city was the birthplace of King Amasis, and is under the

protection of the goddess Neith or Athene. The citizens have a

friendly feeling towards the Athenians, believing themselves to

be related to them. Hither came Solon, and was received with

honour; and here he first learnt, by conversing with the Egyptian

priests, how ignorant he and his countrymen were of antiquity.

Perceiving this, and with the view of eliciting information from

them, he told them the tales of Phoroneus and Niobe, and also of

Deucalion and Pyrrha, and he endeavoured to count the generations

which had since passed. Thereupon an aged priest said to him: ‘O

Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are ever young, and there is no old

man who is a Hellene.’ ‘What do you mean?’ he asked. ‘In mind,’

replied the priest, ‘I mean to say that you are children; there

is no opinion or tradition of knowledge among you which is white

with age; and I will tell you why. Like the rest of mankind you

have suffered from convulsions of nature, which are chiefly

brought about by the two great agencies of fire and water. The

former is symbolized in the Hellenic tale of young Phaethon who

drove his father’s horses the wrong way, and having burnt up the

earth was himself burnt up by a thunderbolt. For there occurs at

long intervals a derangement of the heavenly bodies, and then the

earth is destroyed by fire. At such times, and when fire is the

agent, those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore are safer

than those who dwell upon high and dry places, who in their turn

are safer when the danger is from water. Now the Nile is our

saviour from fire, and as there is little rain in Egypt, we are

not harmed by water; whereas in other countries, when a deluge

comes, the inhabitants are swept by the rivers into the sea. The

memorials which your own and other nations have once had of the

famous actions of mankind perish in the waters at certain

periods; and the rude survivors in the mountains begin again,

knowing nothing of the world before the flood. But in Egypt the

traditions of our own and other lands are by us registered for

ever in our temples. The genealogies which you have recited to us

out of your own annals, Solon, are a mere children’s story. For

in the first place, you remember one deluge only, and there were

many of them, and you know nothing of that fairest and noblest

race of which you are a seed or remnant. The memory of them was

lost, because there was no written voice among you. For in the

times before the great flood Athens was the greatest and best of

cities and did the noblest deeds and had the best constitution of

any under the face of heaven.’ Solon marvelled, and desired to be

informed of the particulars. ‘You are welcome to hear them,’ said

the priest, ‘both for your own sake and for that of the city, and

above all for the sake of the goddess who is the common foundress

of both our cities. Nine thousand years have elapsed since she

founded yours, and eight thousand since she founded ours, as our

annals record. Many laws exist among us which are the counterpart

of yours as they were in the olden time. I will briefly describe

them to you, and you shall read the account of them at your

leisure in the sacred registers. In the first place, there was a

caste of priests among the ancient Athenians, and another of

artisans; also castes of shepherds, hunters, and husbandmen, and

lastly of warriors, who, like the warriors of Egypt, were

separated from the rest, and carried shields and spears, a custom

which the goddess first taught you, and then the Asiatics, and we

among Asiatics first received from her. Observe again, what care

the law took in the pursuit of wisdom, searching out the deep

things of the world, and applying them to the use of man. The

spot of earth which the goddess chose had the best of climates,

and produced the wisest men; in no other was she herself, the

philosopher and warrior goddess, so likely to have votaries. And

there you dwelt as became the children of the gods, excelling all

men in virtue, and many famous actions are recorded of you. The

most famous of them all was the overthrow of the island of

Atlantis. This great island lay over against the Pillars of

Heracles, in extent greater than Libya and Asia put together, and

was the passage to other islands and to a great ocean of which

the Mediterranean sea was only the harbour; and within the

Pillars the empire of Atlantis reached in Europe to Tyrrhenia and

in Libya to Egypt. This mighty power was arrayed against Egypt

and Hellas and all the countries bordering on the Mediterranean.

Then your city did bravely, and won renown over the whole earth.

For at the peril of her own existence, and when the other

Hellenes had deserted her, she repelled the invader, and of her

own accord gave liberty to all the nations within the Pillars. A

little while afterwards there were great earthquakes and floods,

and your warrior race all sank into the earth; and the great

island of Atlantis also disappeared in the sea. This is the

explanation of the shallows which are found in that part of the

Atlantic ocean.’

Such was the tale, Socrates, which Critias heard from Solon; and

I noticed when listening to you yesterday, how close the

resemblance was between your city and citizens and the ancient

Athenian State. But I would not speak at the time, because I

wanted to refresh my memory. I had heard the old man when I was a

child, and though I could not remember the whole of our

yesterday’s discourse, I was able to recall every word of this,

which is branded into my mind; and I am prepared, Socrates, to

rehearse to you the entire narrative. The imaginary State which

you were describing may be identified with the reality of Solon,

and our antediluvian ancestors may be your citizens. ‘That is

excellent, Critias, and very appropriate to a Panathenaic

festival; the truth of the story is a great advantage.’ Then now

let me explain to you the order of our entertainment; first,

Timaeus, who is a natural philosopher, will speak of the origin

of the world, going down to the creation of man, and then I shall

receive the men whom he has created, and some of whom will have

been educated by you, and introduce them to you as the lost

Athenian citizens of whom the Egyptian record spoke. As the law

of Solon prescribes, we will bring them into court and

acknowledge their claims to citizenship. ‘I see,’ replied

Socrates, ‘that I shall be well entertained; and do you, Timaeus,

offer up a prayer and begin.’

TIMAEUS: All men who have any right feeling, at the beginning of

any enterprise, call upon the Gods; and he who is about to speak

of the origin of the universe has a special need of their aid.

May my words be acceptable to them, and may I speak in the manner

which will be most intelligible to you and will best express my

own meaning!

First, I must distinguish between that which always is and never

becomes and which is apprehended by reason and reflection, and

that which always becomes and never is and is conceived by

opinion with the help of sense. All that becomes and is created

is the work of a cause, and that is fair which the artificer

makes after an eternal pattern, but whatever is fashioned after a

created pattern is not fair. Is the world created or

uncreated?—that is the first question. Created, I reply, being

visible and tangible and having a body, and therefore sensible;

and if sensible, then created; and if created, made by a cause,

and the cause is the ineffable father of all things, who had

before him an eternal archetype. For to imagine that the

archetype was created would be blasphemy, seeing that the world

is the noblest of creations, and God is the best of causes. And

the world being thus created according to the eternal pattern is

the copy of something; and we may assume that words are akin to

the matter of which they speak. What is spoken of the unchanging

or intelligible must be certain and true; but what is spoken of

the created image can only be probable; being is to becoming what

truth is to belief. And amid the variety of opinions which have

arisen about God and the nature of the world we must be content

to take probability for our rule, considering that I, who am the

speaker, and you, who are the judges, are only men; to

probability we may attain but no further.

SOCRATES: Excellent, Timaeus, I like your manner of approaching

the subject—proceed.

TIMAEUS: Why did the Creator make the world?...He was good, and

therefore not jealous, and being free from jealousy he desired

that all things should be like himself. Wherefore he set in order

the visible world, which he found in disorder. Now he who is the

best could only create the fairest; and reflecting that of

visible things the intelligent is superior to the unintelligent,

he put intelligence in soul and soul in body, and framed the

universe to be the best and fairest work in the order of nature,

and the world became a living soul through the providence of God.

In the likeness of what animal was the world made?—that is the

third question...The form of the perfect animal was a whole, and

contained all intelligible beings, and the visible animal, made

after the pattern of this, included all visible creatures.

Are there many worlds or one only?—that is the fourth

question...One only. For if in the original there had been more

than one they would have been the parts of a third, which would

have been the true pattern of the world; and therefore there is,

and will ever be, but one created world. Now that which is

created is of necessity corporeal and visible and

tangible,—visible and therefore made of fire,—tangible and

therefore solid and made of earth. But two terms must be united

by a third, which is a mean between them; and had the earth been

a surface only, one mean would have sufficed, but two means are

required to unite solid bodies. And as the world was composed of

solids, between the elements of fire and earth God placed two

other elements of air and water, and arranged them in a

continuous proportion—

fire:air::air:water, and air:water::water:earth,

and so put together a visible and palpable heaven, having harmony

and friendship in the union of the four elements; and being at

unity with itself it was indissoluble except by the hand of the

framer. Each of the elements was taken into the universe whole

and entire; for he considered that the animal should be perfect

and one, leaving no remnants out of which another animal could be

created, and should also be free from old age and disease, which

are produced by the action of external forces. And as he was to

contain all things, he was made in the all-containing form of a

sphere, round as from a lathe and every way equidistant from the

centre, as was natural and suitable to him. He was finished and

smooth, having neither eyes nor ears, for there was nothing

without him which he could see or hear; and he had no need to

carry food to his mouth, nor was there air for him to breathe;

and he did not require hands, for there was nothing of which he

could take hold, nor feet, with which to walk. All that he did

was done rationally in and by himself, and he moved in a circle

turning within himself, which is the most intellectual of

motions; but the other six motions were wanting to him; wherefore

the universe had no feet or legs.

And so the thought of God made a God in the image of a perfect

body, having intercourse with himself and needing no other, but

in every part harmonious and self-contained and truly blessed.

The soul was first made by him—the elder to rule the younger; not

in the order in which our wayward fancy has led us to describe

them, but the soul first and afterwards the body. God took of the

unchangeable and indivisible and also of the divisible and

corporeal, and out of the two he made a third nature, essence,

which was in a mean between them, and partook of the same and the

other, the intractable nature of the other being compressed into

the same. Having made a compound of all the three, he proceeded

to divide the entire mass into portions related to one another in

the ratios of 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 8, 27, and proceeded to fill up the

double and triple intervals thus—

- over 1, 4/3, 3/2, - over 2, 8/3, 3, - over 4, 16/3, 6, - over 8:

- over 1, 3/2, 2, - over 3, 9/2, 6, - over 9, 27/2, 18, - over 27;

in which double series of numbers are two kinds of means; the one

exceeds and is exceeded by equal parts of the extremes, e.g. 1,

4/3, 2; the other kind of mean is one which is equidistant from

the extremes—2, 4, 6. In this manner there were formed intervals

of thirds, 3:2, of fourths, 4:3, and of ninths, 9:8. And next he

filled up the intervals of a fourth with ninths, leaving a

remnant which is in the ratio of 256:243. The entire compound was

divided by him lengthways into two parts, which he united at the

centre like the letter X, and bent into an inner and outer circle

or sphere, cutting one another again at a point over against the

point at which they cross. The outer circle or sphere was named

the sphere of the same—the inner, the sphere of the other or

diverse; and the one revolved horizontally to the right, the

other diagonally to the left. To the sphere of the same which was

undivided he gave dominion, but the sphere of the other or

diverse was distributed into seven unequal orbits, having

intervals in ratios of twos and threes, three of either sort, and

he bade the orbits move in opposite directions to one

another—three of them, the Sun, Mercury, Venus, with equal

swiftness, and the remaining four—the Moon, Saturn, Mars,

Jupiter, with unequal swiftness to the three and to one another,

but all in due proportion.

When the Creator had made the soul he made the body within her;

and the soul interfused everywhere from the centre to the

circumference of heaven, herself turning in herself, began a

divine life of rational and everlasting motion. The body of

heaven is visible, but the soul is invisible, and partakes of

reason and harmony, and is the best of creations, being the work

of the best. And being composed of the same, the other, and the

essence, these three, and also divided and bound in harmonical

proportion, and revolving within herself—the soul when touching

anything which has essence, whether divided or undivided, is

stirred to utter the sameness or diversity of that and some other

thing, and to tell how and when and where individuals are

affected or related, whether in the world of change or of

essence. When reason is in the neighbourhood of sense, and the

circle of the other or diverse is moving truly, then arise true

opinions and beliefs; when reason is in the sphere of thought,

and the circle of the same runs smoothly, then intelligence is

perfected.

When the Father who begat the world saw the image which he had

made of the Eternal Gods moving and living, he rejoiced; and in

his joy resolved, since the archetype was eternal, to make the

creature eternal as far as this was possible. Wherefore he made

an image of eternity which is time, having an uniform motion

according to number, parted into months and days and years, and

also having greater divisions of past, present, and future. These

all apply to becoming in time, and have no meaning in relation to

the eternal nature, which ever is and never was or will be; for

the unchangeable is never older or younger, and when we say that

he ‘was’ or ‘will be,’ we are mistaken, for these words are

applicable only to becoming, and not to true being; and equally

wrong are we in saying that what has become IS become and that

what becomes IS becoming, and that the non-existent IS

non-existent...These are the forms of time which imitate eternity

and move in a circle measured by number.

Thus was time made in the image of the eternal nature; and it was

created together with the heavens, in order that if they were

dissolved, it might perish with them. And God made the sun and

moon and five other wanderers, as they are called, seven in all,

and to each of them he gave a body moving in an orbit, being one

of the seven orbits into which the circle of the other was

divided. He put the moon in the orbit which was nearest to the

earth, the sun in that next, the morning star and Mercury in the

orbits which move opposite to the sun but with equal

swiftness—this being the reason why they overtake and are

overtaken by one another. All these bodies became living

creatures, and learnt their appointed tasks, and began to move,

the nearer more swiftly, the remoter more slowly, according to

the diagonal movement of the other. And since this was controlled

by the movement of the same, the seven planets in their courses

appeared to describe spirals; and that appeared fastest which was

slowest, and that which overtook others appeared to be overtaken

by them. And God lighted a fire in the second orbit from the

earth which is called the sun, to give light over the whole

heaven, and to teach intelligent beings that knowledge of number

which is derived from the revolution of the same. Thus arose day

and night, which are the periods of the most intelligent nature;

a month is created by the revolution of the moon, a year by that

of the sun. Other periods of wonderful length and complexity are

not observed by men in general; there is moreover a cycle or

perfect year at the completion of which they all meet and

coincide...To this end the stars came into being, that the

created heaven might imitate the eternal nature.

Thus far the universal animal was made in the divine image, but

the other animals were not as yet included in him. And God

created them according to the patterns or species of them which

existed in the divine original. There are four of them: one of

gods, another of birds, a third of fishes, and a fourth of

animals. The gods were made in the form of a circle, which is the

most perfect figure and the figure of the universe. They were

created chiefly of fire, that they might be bright, and were made

to know and follow the best, and to be scattered over the

heavens, of which they were to be the glory. Two kinds of motion

were assigned to them—first, the revolution in the same and

around the same, in peaceful unchanging thought of the same; and

to this was added a forward motion which was under the control of

the same. Thus then the fixed stars were created, being divine

and eternal animals, revolving on the same spot, and the

wandering stars, in their courses, were created in the manner

already described. The earth, which is our nurse, clinging around

the pole extended through the universe, he made to be the

guardian and artificer of night and day, first and eldest of gods

that are in the interior of heaven. Vain would be the labour of

telling all the figures of them, moving as in dance, and their

juxta-positions and approximations, and when and where and behind

what other stars they appear to disappear—to tell of all this

without looking at a plan of them would be labour in vain.

The knowledge of the other gods is beyond us, and we can only

accept the traditions of the ancients, who were the children of

the gods, as they said; for surely they must have known their own

ancestors. Although they give no proof, we must believe them as

is customary. They tell us that Oceanus and Tethys were the

children of Earth and Heaven; that Phoreys, Cronos, and Rhea came

in the next generation, and were followed by Zeus and Here, whose

brothers and children are known to everybody.

When all of them, both those who show themselves in the sky, and

those who retire from view, had come into being, the Creator

addressed them thus:—‘Gods, sons of gods, my works, if I will,

are indissoluble. That which is bound may be dissolved, but only

an evil being would dissolve that which is harmonious and happy.

And although you are not immortal you shall not die, for I will

hold you together. Hear me, then:—Three tribes of mortal beings

have still to be created, but if created by me they would be like

gods. Do ye therefore make them; I will implant in them the seed

of immortality, and you shall weave together the mortal and

immortal, and provide food for them, and receive them again in

death.’ Thus he spake, and poured the remains of the elements

into the cup in which he had mingled the soul of the universe.

They were no longer pure as before, but diluted; and the mixture

he distributed into souls equal in number to the stars, and

assigned each to a star—then having mounted them, as in a

chariot, he showed them the nature of the universe, and told them

of their future birth and human lot. They were to be sown in the

planets, and out of them was to come forth the most religious of

animals, which would hereafter be called man. The souls were to

be implanted in bodies, which were in a perpetual flux, whence,

he said, would arise, first, sensation; secondly, love, which is

a mixture of pleasure and pain; thirdly, fear and anger, and the

opposite affections: and if they conquered these, they would live

righteously, but if they were conquered by them, unrighteously.

He who lived well would return to his native star, and would

there have a blessed existence; but, if he lived ill, he would

pass into the nature of a woman, and if he did not then alter his

evil ways, into the likeness of some animal, until the reason

which was in him reasserted her sway over the elements of fire,

air, earth, water, which had engrossed her, and he regained his

first and better nature. Having given this law to his creatures,

that he might be guiltless of their future evil, he sowed them,

some in the earth, some in the moon, and some in the other

planets; and he ordered the younger gods to frame human bodies

for them and to make the necessary additions to them, and to

avert from them all but self-inflicted evil.

Having given these commands, the Creator remained in his own

nature. And his children, receiving from him the immortal

principle, borrowed from the world portions of earth, air, fire,

water, hereafter to be returned, which they fastened together,

not with the adamantine bonds which bound themselves, but by

little invisible pegs, making each separate body out of all the

elements, subject to influx and efflux, and containing the

courses of the soul. These swelling and surging as in a river

moved irregularly and irrationally in all the six possible ways,

forwards, backwards, right, left, up and down. But violent as

were the internal and alimentary fluids, the tide became still

more violent when the body came into contact with flaming fire,

or the solid earth, or gliding waters, or the stormy wind; the

motions produced by these impulses pass through the body to the

soul and have the name of sensations. Uniting with the

ever-flowing current, they shake the courses of the soul,

stopping the revolution of the same and twisting in all sorts of

ways the nature of the other, and the harmonical ratios of twos

and threes and the mean terms which connect them, until the

circles are bent and disordered and their motion becomes

irregular. You may imagine a position of the body in which the

head is resting upon the ground, and the legs are in the air, and

the top is bottom and the left right. And something similar

happens when the disordered motions of the soul come into contact

with any external thing; they say the same or the other in a

manner which is the very opposite of the truth, and they are

false and foolish, and have no guiding principle in them. And

when external impressions enter in, they are really conquered,

though they seem to conquer.

By reason of these affections the soul is at first without

intelligence, but as time goes on the stream of nutriment abates,

and the courses of the soul regain their proper motion, and

apprehend the same and the other rightly, and become rational.

The soul of him who has education is whole and perfect and

escapes the worst disease, but, if a man’s education be

neglected, he walks lamely through life and returns good for

nothing to the world below. This, however, is an after-stage—at

present, we are only concerned with the creation of the body and

soul.

The two divine courses were encased by the gods in a sphere which

is called the head, and is the god and lord of us. And to this

they gave the body to be a vehicle, and the members to be

instruments, having the power of flexion and extension. Such was

the origin of legs and arms. In the next place, the gods gave a

forward motion to the human body, because the front part of man

was the more honourable and had authority. And they put in a face

in which they inserted organs to minister in all things to the

providence of the soul. They first contrived the eyes, into which

they conveyed a light akin to the light of day, making it flow

through the pupils. When the light of the eye is surrounded by

the light of day, then like falls upon like, and they unite and

form one body which conveys to the soul the motions of visible

objects. But when the visual ray goes forth into the darkness,

then unlike falls upon unlike—the eye no longer sees, and we go

to sleep. The fire or light, when kept in by the eyelids,

equalizes the inward motions, and there is rest accompanied by

few dreams; only when the greater motions remain they engender in

us corresponding visions of the night. And now we shall be able

to understand the nature of reflections in mirrors. The fires

from within and from without meet about the smooth and bright

surface of the mirror; and because they meet in a manner contrary

to the usual mode, the right and left sides of the object are

transposed. In a concave mirror the top and bottom are inverted,

but this is no transposition.

These are the second causes which God used as his ministers in

fashioning the world. They are thought by many to be the prime

causes, but they are not so; for they are destitute of mind and

reason, and the lover of mind will not allow that there are any

prime causes other than the rational and invisible ones—these he

investigates first, and afterwards the causes of things which are

moved by others, and which work by chance and without order. Of

the second or concurrent causes of sight I have already spoken,

and I will now speak of the higher purpose of God in giving us

eyes. Sight is the source of the greatest benefits to us; for if

our eyes had never seen the sun, stars, and heavens, the words

which we have spoken would not have been uttered. The sight of

them and their revolutions has given us the knowledge of number

and time, the power of enquiry, and philosophy, which is the

great blessing of human life; not to speak of the lesser benefits

which even the vulgar can appreciate. God gave us the faculty of

sight that we might behold the order of the heavens and create a

corresponding order in our own erring minds. To the like end the

gifts of speech and hearing were bestowed upon us; not for the

sake of irrational pleasure, but in order that we might harmonize

the courses of the soul by sympathy with the harmony of sound,

and cure ourselves of our irregular and graceless ways.

Thus far we have spoken of the works of mind; and there are other

works done from necessity, which we must now place beside them;

for the creation is made up of both, mind persuading necessity as

far as possible to work out good. Before the heavens there

existed fire, air, water, earth, which we suppose men to know,

though no one has explained their nature, and we erroneously

maintain them to be the letters or elements of the whole,

although they cannot reasonably be compared even to syllables or

first compounds. I am not now speaking of the first principles of

things, because I cannot discover them by our present mode of

enquiry. But as I observed the rule of probability at first, I

will begin anew, seeking by the grace of God to observe it still.

In our former discussion I distinguished two kinds of being—the

unchanging or invisible, and the visible or changing. But now a

third kind is required, which I shall call the receptacle or

nurse of generation. There is a difficulty in arriving at an

exact notion of this third kind, because the four elements

themselves are of inexact natures and easily pass into one

another, and are too transient to be detained by any one name;

wherefore we are compelled to speak of water or fire, not as

substances, but as qualities. They may be compared to images made

of gold, which are continually assuming new forms. Somebody asks

what they are; if you do not know, the safest answer is to reply

that they are gold. In like manner there is a universal nature

out of which all things are made, and which is like none of them;

but they enter into and pass out of her, and are made after

patterns of the true in a wonderful and inexplicable manner. The

containing principle may be likened to a mother, the source or

spring to a father, the intermediate nature to a child; and we

may also remark that the matter which receives every variety of

form must be formless, like the inodorous liquids which are

prepared to receive scents, or the smooth and soft materials on

which figures are impressed. In the same way space or matter is

neither earth nor fire nor air nor water, but an invisible and

formless being which receives all things, and in an

incomprehensible manner partakes of the intelligible. But we may

say, speaking generally, that fire is that part of this nature

which is inflamed, water that which is moistened, and the like.

Let me ask a question in which a great principle is involved: Is

there an essence of fire and the other elements, or are there

only fires visible to sense? I answer in a word: If mind is one

thing and true opinion another, then there are self-existent

essences; but if mind is the same with opinion, then the visible

and corporeal is most real. But they are not the same, and they

have a different origin and nature. The one comes to us by

instruction, the other by persuasion, the one is rational, the

other is irrational; the one is movable by persuasion, the other

immovable; the one is possessed by every man, the other by the

gods and by very few men. And we must acknowledge that as there

are two kinds of knowledge, so there are two kinds of being

corresponding to them; the one uncreated, indestructible,

immovable, which is seen by intelligence only; the other created,

which is always becoming in place and vanishing out of place, and

is apprehended by opinion and sense. There is also a third

nature—that of space, which is indestructible, and is perceived

by a kind of spurious reason without the help of sense. This is

presented to us in a dreamy manner, and yet is said to be

necessary, for we say that all things must be somewhere in space.

For they are the images of other things and must therefore have a

separate existence and exist in something (i.e. in space). But

true reason assures us that while two things (i.e. the idea and

the image) are different they cannot inhere in one another, so as

to be one and two at the same time.

To sum up: Being and generation and space, these three, existed

before the heavens, and the nurse or vessel of generation,

moistened by water and inflamed by fire, and taking the forms of

air and earth, assumed various shapes. By the motion of the

vessel, the elements were divided, and like grain winnowed by

fans, the close and heavy particles settled in one place, the

light and airy ones in another. At first they were without reason

and measure, and had only certain faint traces of themselves,

until God fashioned them by figure and number. In this, as in

every other part of creation, I suppose God to have made things,

as far as was possible, fair and good, out of things not fair and

good.

And now I will explain to you the generation of the world by a

method with which your scientific training will have made you

familiar. Fire, air, earth, and water are bodies and therefore

solids, and solids are contained in planes, and plane rectilinear

figures are made up of triangles. Of triangles there are two

kinds; one having the opposite sides equal (isosceles), the other

with unequal sides (scalene). These we may fairly assume to be

the original elements of fire and the other bodies; what

principles are prior to these God only knows, and he of men whom

God loves. Next, we must determine what are the four most

beautiful figures which are unlike one another and yet sometimes

capable of resolution into one another...Of the two kinds of

triangles the equal-sided has but one form, the unequal-sided has

an infinite variety of forms; and there is none more beautiful

than that which forms the half of an equilateral triangle. Let us

then choose two triangles; one, the isosceles, the other, that

form of scalene which has the square of the longer side three

times as great as the square of the lesser side; and affirm that,

out of these, fire and the other elements have been constructed.

I was wrong in imagining that all the four elements could be

generated into and out of one another. For as they are formed,

three of them from the triangle which has the sides unequal, the

fourth from the triangle which has equal sides, three can be

resolved into one another, but the fourth cannot be resolved into

them nor they into it. So much for their passage into one

another: I must now speak of their construction. From the

triangle of which the hypotenuse is twice the lesser side the

three first regular solids are formed—first, the equilateral

pyramid or tetrahedron; secondly, the octahedron; thirdly, the

icosahedron; and from the isosceles triangle is formed the cube.

And there is a fifth figure (which is made out of twelve

pentagons), the dodecahedron—this God used as a model for the

twelvefold division of the Zodiac.

Let us now assign the geometrical forms to their respective

elements. The cube is the most stable of them because resting on

a quadrangular plane surface, and composed of isosceles

triangles. To the earth then, which is the most stable of bodies

and the most easily modelled of them, may be assigned the form of

a cube; and the remaining forms to the other elements,—to fire

the pyramid, to air the octahedron, and to water the

icosahedron,—according to their degrees of lightness or heaviness

or power, or want of power, of penetration. The single particles

of any of the elements are not seen by reason of their smallness;

they only become visible when collected. The ratios of their

motions, numbers, and other properties, are ordered by the God,

who harmonized them as far as necessity permitted.

The probable conclusion is as follows:—Earth, when dissolved by

the more penetrating element of fire, whether acting immediately

or through the medium of air or water, is decomposed but not

transformed. Water, when divided by fire or air, becomes one part

fire, and two parts air. A volume of air divided becomes two of

fire. On the other hand, when condensed, two volumes of fire make

a volume of air; and two and a half parts of air condense into

one of water. Any element which is fastened upon by fire is cut

by the sharpness of the triangles, until at length, coalescing

with the fire, it is at rest; for similars are not affected by

similars. When two kinds of bodies quarrel with one another, then

the tendency to decomposition continues until the smaller either

escapes to its kindred element or becomes one with its conqueror.

And this tendency in bodies to condense or escape is a source of

motion...Where there is motion there must be a mover, and where

there is a mover there must be something to move. These cannot

exist in what is uniform, and therefore motion is due to want of

uniformity. But then why, when things are divided after their

kinds, do they not cease from motion? The answer is, that the

circular motion of all things compresses them, and as ‘nature

abhors a vacuum,’ the finer and more subtle particles of the

lighter elements, such as fire and air, are thrust into the

interstices of the larger, each of them penetrating according to

their rarity, and thus all the elements are on their way up and

down everywhere and always into their own places. Hence there is

a principle of inequality, and therefore of motion, in all time.

In the next place, we may observe that there are different kinds

of fire—(1) flame, (2) light that burns not, (3) the red heat of

the embers of fire. And there are varieties of air, as for

example, the pure aether, the opaque mist, and other nameless

forms. Water, again, is of two kinds, liquid and fusile. The

liquid is composed of small and unequal particles, the fusile of

large and uniform particles and is more solid, but nevertheless

melts at the approach of fire, and then spreads upon the earth.

When the substance cools, the fire passes into the air, which is

displaced, and forces together and condenses the liquid mass.

This process is called cooling and congealment. Of the fusile

kinds the fairest and heaviest is gold; this is hardened by

filtration through rock, and is of a bright yellow colour. A

shoot of gold which is darker and denser than the rest is called

adamant. Another kind is called copper, which is harder and yet

lighter because the interstices are larger than in gold. There is

mingled with it a fine and small portion of earth which comes out

in the form of rust. These are a few of the conjectures which

philosophy forms, when, leaving the eternal nature, she turns for

innocent recreation to consider the truths of generation.

Water which is mingled with fire is called liquid because it

rolls upon the earth, and soft because its bases give way. This

becomes more equable when separated from fire and air, and then

congeals into hail or ice, or the looser forms of hoar frost or

snow. There are other waters which are called juices and are

distilled through plants. Of these we may mention, first, wine,

which warms the soul as well as the body; secondly, oily

substances, as for example, oil or pitch; thirdly, honey, which

relaxes the contracted parts of the mouth and so produces

sweetness; fourthly, vegetable acid, which is frothy and has a

burning quality and dissolves the flesh. Of the kinds of earth,

that which is filtered through water passes into stone; the water

is broken up by the earth and escapes in the form of air—this in

turn presses upon the mass of earth, and the earth, compressed

into an indissoluble union with the remaining water, becomes

rock. Rock, when it is made up of equal particles, is fair and

transparent, but the reverse when of unequal. Earth is converted

into pottery when the watery part is suddenly drawn away; or if

moisture remains, the earth, when fused by fire, becomes, on

cooling, a stone of a black colour. When the earth is finer and

of a briny nature then two half-solid bodies are formed by

separating the water,—soda and salt. The strong compounds of

earth and water are not soluble by water, but only by fire. Earth

itself, when not consolidated, is dissolved by water; when

consolidated, by fire only. The cohesion of water, when strong,

is dissolved by fire only; when weak, either by air or fire, the

former entering the interstices, the latter penetrating even the

triangles. Air when strongly condensed is indissoluble by any

power which does not reach the triangles, and even when not

strongly condensed is only resolved by fire. Compounds of earth

and water are unaffected by water while the water occupies the

interstices in them, but begin to liquefy when fire enters into

the interstices of the water. They are of two kinds, some of

them, like glass, having more earth, others, like wax, having

more water in them.

Having considered objects of sense, we now pass on to sensation.

But we cannot explain sensation without explaining the nature of

flesh and of the mortal soul; and as we cannot treat of both

together, in order that we may proceed at once to the sensations

we must assume the existence of body and soul.

What makes fire burn? The fineness of the sides, the sharpness of

the angles, the smallness of the particles, the quickness of the

motion. Moreover, the pyramid, which is the figure of fire, is

more cutting than any other. The feeling of cold is produced by

the larger particles of moisture outside the body trying to eject

the smaller ones in the body which they compress. The struggle

which arises between elements thus unnaturally brought together

causes shivering. That is hard to which the flesh yields, and

soft which yields to the flesh, and these two terms are also

relative to one another. The yielding matter is that which has

the slenderest base, whereas that which has a rectangular base is

compact and repellent. Light and heavy are wrongly explained with

reference to a lower and higher in place. For in the universe,

which is a sphere, there is no opposition of above or below, and

that which is to us above would be below to a man standing at the

antipodes. The greater or less difficulty in detaching any

element from its like is the real cause of heaviness or of

lightness. If you draw the earth into the dissimilar air, the

particles of earth cling to their native element, and you more

easily detach a small portion than a large. There would be the

same difficulty in moving any of the upper elements towards the

lower. The smooth and the rough are severally produced by the

union of evenness with compactness, and of hardness with

inequality.

Pleasure and pain are the most important of the affections common

to the whole body. According to our general doctrine of

sensation, parts of the body which are easily moved readily

transmit the motion to the mind; but parts which are not easily

moved have no effect upon the patient. The bones and hair are of

the latter kind, sight and hearing of the former. Ordinary

affections are neither pleasant nor painful. The impressions of

sight afford an example of these, and are neither violent nor

sudden. But sudden replenishments of the body cause pleasure, and

sudden disturbances, as for example cuttings and burnings, have

the opposite effect.

>From sensations common to the whole body, we proceed to those of

particular parts. The affections of the tongue appear to be

caused by contraction and dilation, but they have more of

roughness or smoothness than is found in other affections. Earthy

particles, entering into the small veins of the tongue which

reach to the heart, when they melt into and dry up the little

veins are astringent if they are rough; or if not so rough, they

are only harsh, and if excessively abstergent, like potash and

soda, bitter. Purgatives of a weaker sort are called salt and,

having no bitterness, are rather agreeable. Inflammatory bodies,

which by their lightness are carried up into the head, cutting

all that comes in their way, are termed pungent. But when these

are refined by putrefaction, and enter the narrow veins of the

tongue, and meet there particles of earth and air, two kinds of

globules are formed—one of earthy and impure liquid, which boils

and ferments, the other of pure and transparent water, which are

called bubbles; of all these affections the cause is termed acid.

When, on the other hand, the composition of the deliquescent

particles is congenial to the tongue, and disposes the parts

according to their nature, this remedial power in them is called

sweet.

Smells are not divided into kinds; all of them are transitional,

and arise out of the decomposition of one element into another,

for the simple air or water is without smell. They are vapours or

mists, thinner than water and thicker than air: and hence in

drawing in the breath, when there is an obstruction, the air

passes, but there is no smell. They have no names, but are

distinguished as pleasant and unpleasant, and their influence

extends over the whole region from the head to the navel.

Hearing is the effect of a stroke which is transmitted through

the ears by means of the air, brain, and blood to the soul,

beginning at the head and extending to the liver. The sound which

moves swiftly is acute; that which moves slowly is grave; that

which is uniform is smooth, and the opposite is harsh. Loudness

depends on the quantity of the sound. Of the harmony of sounds I

will hereafter speak.

Colours are flames which emanate from all bodies, having

particles corresponding to the sense of sight. Some of the

particles are less and some larger, and some are equal to the

parts of the sight. The equal particles appear transparent; the

larger contract, and the lesser dilate the sight. White is

produced by the dilation, black by the contraction, of the

particles of sight. There is also a swifter motion of another

sort of fire which forces a way through the passages of the eyes,

and elicits from them a union of fire and water which we call

tears. The inner fire flashes forth, and the outer finds a way in

and is extinguished in the moisture, and all sorts of colours are

generated by the mixture. This affection is termed by us

dazzling, and the object which produces it is called bright.

There is yet another sort of fire which mingles with the moisture

of the eye without flashing, and produces a colour like blood—to

this we give the name of red. A bright element mingling with red

and white produces a colour which we call auburn. The law of

proportion, however, according to which compound colours are

formed, cannot be determined scientifically or even probably.

Red, when mingled with black and white, gives a purple hue, which

becomes umber when the colours are burnt and there is a larger

admixture of black. Flame-colour is a mixture of auburn and dun;

dun of white and black; yellow of white and auburn. White and

bright meeting, and falling upon a full black, become dark blue;

dark blue mingling with white becomes a light blue; the union of

flame-colour and black makes leek-green. There is no difficulty

in seeing how other colours are probably composed. But he who

should attempt to test the truth of this by experiment, would

forget the difference of the human and divine nature. God only is

able to compound and resolve substances; such experiments are

impossible to man.

These are the elements of necessity which the Creator received in

the world of generation when he made the all-sufficient and

perfect creature, using the secondary causes as his ministers,

but himself fashioning the good in all things. For there are two

sorts of causes, the one divine, the other necessary; and we

should seek to discover the divine above all, and, for their

sake, the necessary, because without them the higher cannot be

attained by us.

Having now before us the causes out of which the rest of our

discourse is to be framed, let us go back to the point at which

we began, and add a fair ending to our tale. As I said at first,

all things were originally a chaos in which there was no order or

proportion. The elements of this chaos were arranged by the

Creator, and out of them he made the world. Of the divine he

himself was the author, but he committed to his offspring the

creation of the mortal. From him they received the immortal soul,

but themselves made the body to be its vehicle, and constructed

within another soul which was mortal, and subject to terrible

affections—pleasure, the inciter of evil; pain, which deters from

good; rashness and fear, foolish counsellors; anger hard to be

appeased; hope easily led astray. These they mingled with

irrational sense and all-daring love according to necessary laws

and so framed man. And, fearing to pollute the divine element,

they gave the mortal soul a separate habitation in the breast,

parted off from the head by a narrow isthmus. And as in a house

the women’s apartments are divided from the men’s, the cavity of

the thorax was divided into two parts, a higher and a lower. The

higher of the two, which is the seat of courage and anger, lies

nearer to the head, between the midriff and the neck, and assists

reason in restraining the desires. The heart is the house of

guard in which all the veins meet, and through them reason sends

her commands to the extremity of her kingdom. When the passions

are in revolt, or danger approaches from without, then the heart

beats and swells; and the creating powers, knowing this,

implanted in the body the soft and bloodless substance of the

lung, having a porous and springy nature like a sponge, and being

kept cool by drink and air which enters through the trachea.

The part of the soul which desires meat and drink was placed

between the midriff and navel, where they made a sort of manger;

and here they bound it down, like a wild animal, away from the

council-chamber, and leaving the better principle undisturbed to

advise quietly for the good of the whole. For the Creator knew

that the belly would not listen to reason, and was under the

power of idols and fancies. Wherefore he framed the liver to

connect with the lower nature, contriving that it should be

compact, and bright, and sweet, and also bitter and smooth, in

order that the power of thought which originates in the mind

might there be reflected, terrifying the belly with the elements

of bitterness and gall, and a suffusion of bilious colours when

the liver is contracted, and causing pain and misery by twisting

out of its place the lobe and closing up the vessels and gates.

And the converse happens when some gentle inspiration coming from

intelligence mirrors the opposite fancies, giving rest and

sweetness and freedom, and at night, moderation and peace

accompanied with prophetic insight, when reason and sense are

asleep. For the authors of our being, in obedience to their

Father’s will and in order to make men as good as they could,

gave to the liver the power of divination, which is never active

when men are awake or in health; but when they are under the

influence of some disorder or enthusiasm then they receive

intimations, which have to be interpreted by others who are

called prophets, but should rather be called interpreters of

prophecy; after death these intimations become unintelligible.

The spleen which is situated in the neighbourhood, on the left

side, keeps the liver bright and clean, as a napkin does a

mirror, and the evacuations of the liver are received into it;

and being a hollow tissue it is for a time swollen with these

impurities, but when the body is purged it returns to its natural

size.

The truth concerning the soul can only be established by the word

of God. Still, we may venture to assert what is probable both

concerning soul and body.

The creative powers were aware of our tendency to excess. And so

when they made the belly to be a receptacle for food, in order

that men might not perish by insatiable gluttony, they formed the

convolutions of the intestines, in this way retarding the passage

of food through the body, lest mankind should be absorbed in

eating and drinking, and the whole race become impervious to

divine philosophy.

The creation of bones and flesh was on this wise. The foundation

of these is the marrow which binds together body and soul, and

the marrow is made out of such of the primary triangles as are

adapted by their perfection to produce all the four elements.

These God took and mingled them in due proportion, making as many

kinds of marrow as there were hereafter to be kinds of souls. The

receptacle of the divine soul he made round, and called that

portion of the marrow brain, intending that the vessel containing

this substance should be the head. The remaining part he divided

into long and round figures, and to these as to anchors,

fastening the mortal soul, he proceeded to make the rest of the

body, first forming for both parts a covering of bone. The bone

was formed by sifting pure smooth earth and wetting it with

marrow. It was then thrust alternately into fire and water, and

thus rendered insoluble by either. Of bone he made a globe which

he placed around the brain, leaving a narrow opening, and around

the marrow of the neck and spine he formed the vertebrae, like

hinges, which extended from the head through the whole of the

trunk. And as the bone was brittle and liable to mortify and

destroy the marrow by too great rigidity and susceptibility to

heat and cold, he contrived sinews and flesh—the first to give

flexibility, the second to guard against heat and cold, and to be

a protection against falls, containing a warm moisture, which in

summer exudes and cools the body, and in winter is a defence

against cold. Having this in view, the Creator mingled earth with

fire and water and mixed with them a ferment of acid and salt, so

as to form pulpy flesh. But the sinews he made of a mixture of

bone and unfermented flesh, giving them a mean nature between the

two, and a yellow colour. Hence they were more glutinous than

flesh, but softer than bone. The bones which have most of the

living soul within them he covered with the thinnest film of

flesh, those which have least of it, he lodged deeper. At the

joints he diminished the flesh in order not to impede the flexure

of the limbs, and also to avoid clogging the perceptions of the

mind. About the thighs and arms, which have no sense because

there is little soul in the marrow, and about the inner bones, he

laid the flesh thicker. For where the flesh is thicker there is

less feeling, except in certain parts which the Creator has made

solely of flesh, as for example, the tongue. Had the combination

of solid bone and thick flesh been consistent with acute

perceptions, the Creator would have given man a sinewy and fleshy

head, and then he would have lived twice as long. But our

creators were of opinion that a shorter life which was better was

preferable to a longer which was worse, and therefore they

covered the head with thin bone, and placed the sinews at the

extremity of the head round the neck, and fastened the jawbones

to them below the face. And they framed the mouth, having teeth

and tongue and lips, with a view to the necessary and the good;

for food is a necessity, and the river of speech is the best of

rivers. Still, the head could not be left a bare globe of bone on

account of the extremes of heat and cold, nor be allowed to

become dull and senseless by an overgrowth of flesh. Wherefore it

was covered by a peel or skin which met and grew by the help of

the cerebral humour. The diversity of the sutures was caused by

the struggle of the food against the courses of the soul. The

skin of the head was pierced by fire, and out of the punctures

came forth a moisture, part liquid, and part of a skinny nature,

which was hardened by the pressure of the external cold and

became hair. And God gave hair to the head of man to be a light

covering, so that it might not interfere with his perceptions.

Nails were formed by combining sinew, skin, and bone, and were

made by the creators with a view to the future when, as they

knew, women and other animals who would require them would be

framed out of man.

The gods also mingled natures akin to that of man with other

forms and perceptions. Thus trees and plants were created, which

were originally wild and have been adapted by cultivation to our

use. They partake of that third kind of life which is seated

between the midriff and the navel, and is altogether passive and

incapable of reflection.

When the creators had furnished all these natures for our

sustenance, they cut channels through our bodies as in a garden,

watering them with a perennial stream. Two were cut down the

back, along the back bone, where the skin and flesh meet, one on

the right and the other on the left, having the marrow of

generation between them. In the next place, they divided the

veins about the head and interlaced them with each other in order

that they might form an additional link between the head and the

body, and that the sensations from both sides might be diffused

throughout the body. In the third place, they contrived the

passage of liquids, which may be explained in this way:—Finer

bodies retain coarser, but not the coarser the finer, and the

belly is capable of retaining food, but not fire and air. God

therefore formed a network of fire and air to irrigate the veins,

having within it two lesser nets, and stretched cords reaching

from both the lesser nets to the extremity of the outer net. The

inner parts of the net were made by him of fire, the lesser nets

and their cavities of air. The two latter he made to pass into

the mouth; the one ascending by the air-pipes from the lungs, the

other by the side of the air-pipes from the belly. The entrance

to the first he divided into two parts, both of which he made to

meet at the channels of the nose, that when the mouth was closed

the passage connected with it might still be fed with air. The

cavity of the network he spread around the hollows of the body,

making the entire receptacle to flow into and out of the lesser

nets and the lesser nets into and out of it, while the outer net

found a way into and out of the pores of the body, and the

internal heat followed the air to and fro. These, as we affirm,

are the phenomena of respiration. And all this process takes

place in order that the body may be watered and cooled and

nourished, and the meat and drink digested and liquefied and

carried into the veins.

The causes of respiration have now to be considered. The

exhalation of the breath through the mouth and nostrils displaces

the external air, and at the same time leaves a vacuum into which

through the pores the air which is displaced enters. Also the

vacuum which is made when the air is exhaled through the pores is

filled up by the inhalation of breath through the mouth and

nostrils. The explanation of this double phenomenon is as

follows:—Elements move towards their natural places. Now as every

animal has within him a fountain of fire, the air which is

inhaled through the mouth and nostrils, on coming into contact

with this, is heated; and when heated, in accordance with the law

of attraction, it escapes by the way it entered toward the place

of fire. On leaving the body it is cooled and drives round the

air which it displaces through the pores into the empty lungs.

This again is in turn heated by the internal fire and escapes, as

it entered, through the pores.

The phenomena of medical cupping-glasses, of swallowing, and of

the hurling of bodies, are to be explained on a similar

principle; as also sounds, which are sometimes discordant on

account of the inequality of them, and again harmonious by reason

of equality. The slower sounds reaching the swifter, when they

begin to pause, by degrees assimilate with them: whence arises a

pleasure which even the unwise feel, and which to the wise

becomes a higher sense of delight, being an imitation of divine

harmony in mortal motions. Streams flow, lightnings play, amber

and the magnet attract, not by reason of attraction, but because

‘nature abhors a vacuum,’ and because things, when compounded or

dissolved, move different ways, each to its own place.

I will now return to the phenomena of respiration. The fire,

entering the belly, minces the food, and as it escapes, fills the

veins by drawing after it the divided portions, and thus the

streams of nutriment are diffused through the body. The fruits or

herbs which are our daily sustenance take all sorts of colours

when intermixed, but the colour of red or fire predominates, and

hence the liquid which we call blood is red, being the nurturing

principle of the body, whence all parts are watered and empty

places filled.

The process of repletion and depletion is produced by the

attraction of like to like, after the manner of the universal

motion. The external elements by their attraction are always

diminishing the substance of the body: the particles of blood,

too, formed out of the newly digested food, are attracted towards

kindred elements within the body and so fill up the void. When

more is taken away than flows in, then we decay; and when less,

we grow and increase.

The young of every animal has the triangles new and closely

locked together, and yet the entire frame is soft and delicate,

being newly made of marrow and nurtured on milk. These triangles

are sharper than those which enter the body from without in the

shape of food, and therefore they cut them up. But as life

advances, the triangles wear out and are no longer able to

assimilate food; and at length, when the bonds which unite the

triangles of the marrow become undone, they in turn unloose the

bonds of the soul; and if the release be according to nature, she

then flies away with joy. For the death which is natural is

pleasant, but that which is caused by violence is painful.

Every one may understand the origin of diseases. They may be

occasioned by the disarrangement or disproportion of the elements

out of which the body is framed. This is the origin of many of

them, but the worst of all owe their severity to the following

causes: There is a natural order in the human frame according to

which the flesh and sinews are made of blood, the sinews out of

the fibres, and the flesh out of the congealed substance which is

formed by separation from the fibres. The glutinous matter which

comes away from the sinews and the flesh, not only binds the

flesh to the bones, but nourishes the bones and waters the

marrow. When these processes take place in regular order the body

is in health.

But when the flesh wastes and returns into the veins there is

discoloured blood as well as air in the veins, having acid and

salt qualities, from which is generated every sort of phlegm and

bile. All things go the wrong way and cease to give nourishment

to the body, no longer preserving their natural courses, but at

war with themselves and destructive to the constitution of the

body. The oldest part of the flesh which is hard to decompose

blackens from long burning, and from being corroded grows bitter,

and as the bitter element refines away, becomes acid. When tinged

with blood the bitter substance has a red colour, and this when

mixed with black takes the hue of grass; or again, the bitter

substance has an auburn colour, when new flesh is decomposed by

the internal flame. To all which phenomena some physician or

philosopher who was able to see the one in many has given the

name of bile. The various kinds of bile have names answering to

their colours. Lymph or serum is of two kinds: first, the whey of

blood, which is gentle; secondly, the secretion of dark and

bitter bile, which, when mingled under the influence of heat with

salt, is malignant and is called acid phlegm. There is also white

phlegm, formed by the decomposition of young and tender flesh,

and covered with little bubbles, separately invisible, but

becoming visible when collected. The water of tears and

perspiration and similar substances is also the watery part of

fresh phlegm. All these humours become sources of disease when

the blood is replenished in irregular ways and not by food or

drink. The danger, however, is not so great when the foundation

remains, for then there is a possibility of recovery. But when

the substance which unites the flesh and bones is diseased, and

is no longer renewed from the muscles and sinews, and instead of

being oily and smooth and glutinous becomes rough and salt and

dry, then the fleshy parts fall away and leave the sinews bare

and full of brine, and the flesh gets back again into the

circulation of the blood, and makes the previously mentioned

disorders still greater. There are other and worse diseases which

are prior to these; as when the bone through the density of the

flesh does not receive sufficient air, and becomes stagnant and

gangrened, and crumbling away passes into the food, and the food

into the flesh, and the flesh returns again into the blood. Worst

of all and most fatal is the disease of the marrow, by which the

whole course of the body is reversed. There is a third class of

diseases which are produced, some by wind and some by phlegm and

some by bile. When the lung, which is the steward of the air, is

obstructed, by rheums, and in one part no air, and in another too

much, enters in, then the parts which are unrefreshed by air

corrode, and other parts are distorted by the excess of air; and

in this manner painful diseases are produced. The most painful

are caused by wind generated within the body, which gets about

the great sinews of the shoulders—these are termed tetanus. The

cure of them is difficult, and in most cases they are relieved

only by fever. White phlegm, which is dangerous if kept in, by

reason of the air bubbles, is not equally dangerous if able to

escape through the pores, although it variegates the body,

generating diverse kinds of leprosies. If, when mingled with

black bile, it disturbs the courses of the head in sleep, there

is not so much danger; but if it assails those who are awake,

then the attack is far more dangerous, and is called epilepsy or

the sacred disease. Acid and salt phlegm is the source of

catarrh.

Inflammations originate in bile, which is sometimes relieved by

boils and swellings, but when detained, and above all when

mingled with pure blood, generates many inflammatory disorders,

disturbing the position of the fibres which are scattered about

in the blood in order to maintain the balance of rare and dense

which is necessary to its regular circulation. If the bile, which

is only stale blood, or liquefied flesh, comes in little by

little, it is congealed by the fibres and produces internal cold

and shuddering. But when it enters with more of a flood it

overcomes the fibres by its heat and reaches the spinal marrow,

and burning up the cables of the soul sets her free from the

body. When on the other hand the body, though wasted, still holds

out, then the bile is expelled, like an exile from a factious

state, causing associating diarrhoeas and dysenteries and similar

disorders. The body which is diseased from the effects of fire is

in a continual fever; when air is the agent, the fever is

quotidian; when water, the fever intermits a day; when earth,

which is the most sluggish element, the fever intermits three

days and is with difficulty shaken off.

Of mental disorders there are two sorts, one madness, the other

ignorance, and they may be justly attributed to disease.

Excessive pleasures or pains are among the greatest diseases, and

deprive men of their senses. When the seed about the spinal

marrow is too abundant, the body has too great pleasures and

pains; and during a great part of his life he who is the subject

of them is more or less mad. He is often thought bad, but this is

a mistake; for the truth is that the intemperance of lust is due

to the fluidity of the marrow produced by the loose consistency

of the bones. And this is true of vice in general, which is

commonly regarded as disgraceful, whereas it is really

involuntary and arises from a bad habit of the body and evil

education. In like manner the soul is often made vicious by the

influence of bodily pain; the briny phlegm and other bitter and

bilious humours wander over the body and find no exit, but are

compressed within, and mingle their own vapours with the motions

of the soul, and are carried to the three places of the soul,

creating infinite varieties of trouble and melancholy, of

rashness and cowardice, of forgetfulness and stupidity. When men

are in this evil plight of body, and evil forms of government and

evil discourses are superadded, and there is no education to save

them, they are corrupted through two causes; but of neither of

them are they really the authors. For the planters are to blame

rather than the plants, the educators and not the educated.

Still, we should endeavour to attain virtue and avoid vice; but

this is part of another subject.

Enough of disease—I have now to speak of the means by which the

mind and body are to be preserved, a higher theme than the other.

The good is the beautiful, and the beautiful is the symmetrical,

and there is no greater or fairer symmetry than that of body and

soul, as the contrary is the greatest of deformities. A leg or an

arm too long or too short is at once ugly and unserviceable, and

the same is true if body and soul are disproportionate. For a

strong and impassioned soul may ‘fret the pigmy body to decay,’

and so produce convulsions and other evils. The violence of

controversy, or the earnestness of enquiry, will often generate

inflammations and rheums which are not understood, or assigned to

their true cause by the professors of medicine. And in like

manner the body may be too much for the soul, darkening the

reason, and quickening the animal desires. The only security is

to preserve the balance of the two, and to this end the

mathematician or philosopher must practise gymnastics, and the

gymnast must cultivate music. The parts of the body too must be

treated in the same way—they should receive their appropriate

exercise. For the body is set in motion when it is heated and

cooled by the elements which enter in, or is dried up and

moistened by external things; and, if given up to these processes

when at rest, it is liable to destruction. But the natural

motion, as in the world, so also in the human frame, produces

harmony and divides hostile powers. The best exercise is the

spontaneous motion of the body, as in gymnastics, because most

akin to the motion of mind; not so good is the motion of which

the source is in another, as in sailing or riding; least good

when the body is at rest and the motion is in parts only, which

is a species of motion imparted by physic. This should only be

resorted to by men of sense in extreme cases; lesser diseases are

not to be irritated by medicine. For every disease is akin to the

living being and has an appointed term, just as life has, which

depends on the form of the triangles, and cannot be protracted

when they are worn out. And he who, instead of accepting his

destiny, endeavours to prolong his life by medicine, is likely to

multiply and magnify his diseases. Regimen and not medicine is

the true cure, when a man has time at his disposal.

Enough of the nature of man and of the body, and of training and

education. The subject is a great one and cannot be adequately

treated as an appendage to another. To sum up all in a word:

there are three kinds of soul located within us, and any one of

them, if remaining inactive, becomes very weak; if exercised,

very strong. Wherefore we should duly train and exercise all

three kinds.

The divine soul God lodged in the head, to raise us, like plants

which are not of earthly origin, to our kindred; for the head is

nearest to heaven. He who is intent upon the gratification of his

desires and cherishes the mortal soul, has all his ideas mortal,

and is himself mortal in the truest sense. But he who seeks after

knowledge and exercises the divine part of himself in godly and

immortal thoughts, attains to truth and immortality, as far as is

possible to man, and also to happiness, while he is training up

within him the divine principle and indwelling power of order.

There is only one way in which one person can benefit another;

and that is by assigning to him his proper nurture and motion. To

the motions of the soul answer the motions of the universe, and

by the study of these the individual is restored to his original

nature.

Thus we have finished the discussion of the universe, which,

according to our original intention, has now been brought down to

the creation of man. Completeness seems to require that something

should be briefly said about other animals: first of women, who

are probably degenerate and cowardly men. And when they

degenerated, the gods implanted in men the desire of union with

them, creating in man one animate substance and in woman another

in the following manner:—The outlet for liquids they connected

with the living principle of the spinal marrow, which the man has

the desire to emit into the fruitful womb of the woman; this is

like a fertile field in which the seed is quickened and matured,

and at last brought to light. When this desire is unsatisfied the

man is over-mastered by the power of the generative organs, and

the woman is subjected to disorders from the obstruction of the

passages of the breath, until the two meet and pluck the fruit of

the tree.

The race of birds was created out of innocent, light-minded men,

who thought to pursue the study of the heavens by sight; these

were transformed into birds, and grew feathers instead of hair.

The race of wild animals were men who had no philosophy, and

never looked up to heaven or used the courses of the head, but

followed only the influences of passion. Naturally they turned to

their kindred earth, and put their forelegs to the ground, and

their heads were crushed into strange oblong forms. Some of them

have four feet, and some of them more than four,—the latter, who

are the more senseless, drawing closer to their native element;

the most senseless of all have no limbs and trail their whole

body on the ground. The fourth kind are the inhabitants of the

waters; these are made out of the most senseless and ignorant and

impure of men, whom God placed in the uttermost parts of the

world in return for their utter ignorance, and caused them to

respire water instead of the pure element of air. Such are the

laws by which animals pass into one another.

And so the world received animals, mortal and immortal, and was

fulfilled with them, and became a visible God, comprehending the

visible, made in the image of the Intellectual, being the one

perfect only-begotten heaven.

Nature in the aspect which she presented to a Greek philosopher

of the fourth century before Christ is not easily reproduced to

modern eyes. The associations of mythology and poetry have to be

added, and the unconscious influence of science has to be

subtracted, before we can behold the heavens or the earth as they

appeared to the Greek. The philosopher himself was a child and

also a man—a child in the range of his attainments, but also a

great intelligence having an insight into nature, and often

anticipations of the truth. He was full of original thoughts, and

yet liable to be imposed upon by the most obvious fallacies. He

occasionally confused numbers with ideas, and atoms with numbers;

his a priori notions were out of all proportion to his

experience. He was ready to explain the phenomena of the heavens

by the most trivial analogies of earth. The experiments which

nature worked for him he sometimes accepted, but he never tried

experiments for himself which would either prove or disprove his

theories. His knowledge was unequal; while in some branches, such

as medicine and astronomy, he had made considerable proficiency,

there were others, such as chemistry, electricity, mechanics, of

which the very names were unknown to him. He was the natural

enemy of mythology, and yet mythological ideas still retained

their hold over him. He was endeavouring to form a conception of

principles, but these principles or ideas were regarded by him as

real powers or entities, to which the world had been subjected.

He was always tending to argue from what was near to what was

remote, from what was known to what was unknown, from man to the

universe, and back again from the universe to man. While he was

arranging the world, he was arranging the forms of thought in his

own mind; and the light from within and the light from without

often crossed and helped to confuse one another. He might be

compared to a builder engaged in some great design, who could

only dig with his hands because he was unprovided with common

tools; or to some poet or musician, like Tynnichus (Ion), obliged

to accommodate his lyric raptures to the limits of the tetrachord

or of the flute.

The Hesiodic and Orphic cosmogonies were a phase of thought

intermediate between mythology and philosophy and had a great

influence on the beginnings of knowledge. There was nothing

behind them; they were to physical science what the poems of

Homer were to early Greek history. They made men think of the

world as a whole; they carried the mind back into the infinity of

past time; they suggested the first observation of the effects of

fire and water on the earth’s surface. To the ancient physics

they stood much in the same relation which geology does to modern

science. But the Greek was not, like the enquirer of the last

generation, confined to a period of six thousand years; he was

able to speculate freely on the effects of infinite ages in the

production of physical phenomena. He could imagine cities which

had existed time out of mind (States.; Laws), laws or forms of

art and music which had lasted, ‘not in word only, but in very

truth, for ten thousand years’ (Laws); he was aware that natural

phenomena like the Delta of the Nile might have slowly

accumulated in long periods of time (Hdt.). But he seems to have

supposed that the course of events was recurring rather than

progressive. To this he was probably led by the fixedness of

Egyptian customs and the general observation that there were

other civilisations in the world more ancient than that of

Hellas.

The ancient philosophers found in mythology many ideas which, if

not originally derived from nature, were easily transferred to

her—such, for example, as love or hate, corresponding to

attraction or repulsion; or the conception of necessity allied

both to the regularity and irregularity of nature; or of chance,

the nameless or unknown cause; or of justice, symbolizing the law

of compensation; are of the Fates and Furies, typifying the fixed

order or the extraordinary convulsions of nature. Their own

interpretations of Homer and the poets were supposed by them to

be the original meaning. Musing in themselves on the phenomena of

nature, they were relieved at being able to utter the thoughts of

their hearts in figures of speech which to them were not figures,

and were already consecrated by tradition. Hesiod and the Orphic

poets moved in a region of half-personification in which the

meaning or principle appeared through the person. In their vaster

conceptions of Chaos, Erebus, Aether, Night, and the like, the

first rude attempts at generalization are dimly seen. The Gods

themselves, especially the greater Gods, such as Zeus, Poseidon,

Apollo, Athene, are universals as well as individuals. They were

gradually becoming lost in a common conception of mind or God.

They continued to exist for the purposes of ritual or of art; but

from the sixth century onwards or even earlier there arose and

gained strength in the minds of men the notion of ‘one God,

greatest among Gods and men, who was all sight, all hearing, all

knowing’ (Xenophanes).

Under the influence of such ideas, perhaps also deriving from the

traditions of their own or of other nations scraps of medicine

and astronomy, men came to the observation of nature. The Greek

philosopher looked at the blue circle of the heavens and it

flashed upon him that all things were one; the tumult of sense

abated, and the mind found repose in the thought which former

generations had been striving to realize. The first expression of

this was some element, rarefied by degrees into a pure

abstraction, and purged from any tincture of sense. Soon an inner

world of ideas began to be unfolded, more absorbing, more

overpowering, more abiding than the brightest of visible objects,

which to the eye of the philosopher looking inward, seemed to

pale before them, retaining only a faint and precarious

existence. At the same time, the minds of men parted into the two

great divisions of those who saw only a principle of motion, and

of those who saw only a principle of rest, in nature and in

themselves; there were born Heracliteans or Eleatics, as there

have been in later ages born Aristotelians or Platonists. Like

some philosophers in modern times, who are accused of making a

theory first and finding their facts afterwards, the advocates of

either opinion never thought of applying either to themselves or

to their adversaries the criterion of fact. They were mastered by

their ideas and not masters of them. Like the Heraclitean

fanatics whom Plato has ridiculed in the Theaetetus, they were

incapable of giving a reason of the faith that was in them, and

had all the animosities of a religious sect. Yet, doubtless,

there was some first impression derived from external nature,

which, as in mythology, so also in philosophy, worked upon the

minds of the first thinkers. Though incapable of induction or

generalization in the modern sense, they caught an inspiration

from the external world. The most general facts or appearances of

nature, the circle of the universe, the nutritive power of water,

the air which is the breath of life, the destructive force of

fire, the seeming regularity of the greater part of nature and

the irregularity of a remnant, the recurrence of day and night

and of the seasons, the solid earth and the impalpable aether,

were always present to them.

The great source of error and also the beginning of truth to them

was reasoning from analogy; they could see resemblances, but not

differences; and they were incapable of distinguishing

illustration from argument. Analogy in modern times only points

the way, and is immediately verified by experiment. The dreams

and visions, which pass through the philosopher’s mind, of

resemblances between different classes of substances, or between

the animal and vegetable world, are put into the refiner’s fire,

and the dross and other elements which adhere to them are purged

away. But the contemporary of Plato and Socrates was incapable of

resisting the power of any analogy which occurred to him, and was

drawn into any consequences which seemed to follow. He had no

methods of difference or of concomitant variations, by the use of

which he could distinguish the accidental from the essential. He

could not isolate phenomena, and he was helpless against the

influence of any word which had an equivocal or double sense.

Yet without this crude use of analogy the ancient physical

philosopher would have stood still; he could not have made even

‘one guess among many’ without comparison. The course of natural

phenomena would have passed unheeded before his eyes, like fair

sights or musical sounds before the eyes and ears of an animal.

Even the fetichism of the savage is the beginning of reasoning;

the assumption of the most fanciful of causes indicates a higher

mental state than the absence of all enquiry about them. The

tendency to argue from the higher to the lower, from man to the

world, has led to many errors, but has also had an elevating

influence on philosophy. The conception of the world as a whole,

a person, an animal, has been the source of hasty

generalizations; yet this general grasp of nature led also to a

spirit of comprehensiveness in early philosophy, which has not

increased, but rather diminished, as the fields of knowledge have

become more divided. The modern physicist confines himself to one

or perhaps two branches of science. But he comparatively seldom

rises above his own department, and often falls under the

narrowing influence which any single branch, when pursued to the

exclusion of every other, has over the mind. Language, two,

exercised a spell over the beginnings of physical philosophy,

leading to error and sometimes to truth; for many thoughts were

suggested by the double meanings of words (Greek), and the

accidental distinctions of words sometimes led the ancient

philosopher to make corresponding differences in things (Greek).

‘If they are the same, why have they different names; or if they

are different, why have they the same name?’—is an argument not

easily answered in the infancy of knowledge. The modern

philosopher has always been taught the lesson which he still

imperfectly learns, that he must disengage himself from the

influence of words. Nor are there wanting in Plato, who was

himself too often the victim of them, impressive admonitions that

we should regard not words but things (States.). But upon the

whole, the ancients, though not entirely dominated by them, were

much more subject to the influence of words than the moderns.

They had no clear divisions of colours or substances; even the

four elements were undefined; the fields of knowledge were not

parted off. They were bringing order out of disorder, having a

small grain of experience mingled in a confused heap of a priori

notions. And yet, probably, their first impressions, the

illusions and mirages of their fancy, created a greater

intellectual activity and made a nearer approach to the truth

than any patient investigation of isolated facts, for which the

time had not yet come, could have accomplished.

There was one more illusion to which the ancient philosophers

were subject, and against which Plato in his later dialogues

seems to be struggling—the tendency to mere abstractions; not

perceiving that pure abstraction is only negation, they thought

that the greater the abstraction the greater the truth. Behind

any pair of ideas a new idea which comprehended them—the (Greek),

as it was technically termed—began at once to appear. Two are

truer than three, one than two. The words ‘being,’ or ‘unity,’ or

essence,’ or ‘good,’ became sacred to them. They did not see that

they had a word only, and in one sense the most unmeaning of

words. They did not understand that the content of notions is in

inverse proportion to their universality—the element which is the

most widely diffused is also the thinnest; or, in the language of

the common logic, the greater the extension the less the

comprehension. But this vacant idea of a whole without parts, of

a subject without predicates, a rest without motion, has been

also the most fruitful of all ideas. It is the beginning of a

priori thought, and indeed of thinking at all. Men were led to

conceive it, not by a love of hasty generalization, but by a

divine instinct, a dialectical enthusiasm, in which the human

faculties seemed to yearn for enlargement. We know that ‘being’

is only the verb of existence, the copula, the most general

symbol of relation, the first and most meagre of abstractions;

but to some of the ancient philosophers this little word appeared

to attain divine proportions, and to comprehend all truth. Being

or essence, and similar words, represented to them a supreme or

divine being, in which they thought that they found the

containing and continuing principle of the universe. In a few

years the human mind was peopled with abstractions; a new world

was called into existence to give law and order to the old. But

between them there was still a gulf, and no one could pass from

the one to the other.

Number and figure were the greatest instruments of thought which

were possessed by the Greek philosopher; having the same power

over the mind which was exerted by abstract ideas, they were also

capable of practical application. Many curious and, to the early

thinker, mysterious properties of them came to light when they

were compared with one another. They admitted of infinite

multiplication and construction; in Pythagorean triangles or in

proportions of 1:2:4:8 and 1:3:9:27, or compounds of them, the

laws of the world seemed to be more than half revealed. They were

also capable of infinite subdivision—a wonder and also a puzzle

to the ancient thinker (Rep.). They were not, like being or

essence, mere vacant abstractions, but admitted of progress and

growth, while at the same time they confirmed a higher sentiment

of the mind, that there was order in the universe. And so there

began to be a real sympathy between the world within and the

world without. The numbers and figures which were present to the

mind’s eye became visible to the eye of sense; the truth of

nature was mathematics; the other properties of objects seemed to

reappear only in the light of number. Law and morality also found

a natural expression in number and figure. Instruments of such

power and elasticity could not fail to be ‘a most gracious

assistance’ to the first efforts of human intelligence.

There was another reason why numbers had so great an influence

over the minds of early thinkers—they were verified by

experience. Every use of them, even the most trivial, assured men

of their truth; they were everywhere to be found, in the least

things and the greatest alike. One, two, three, counted on the

fingers was a ‘trivial matter (Rep.), a little instrument out of

which to create a world; but from these and by the help of these

all our knowledge of nature has been developed. They were the

measure of all things, and seemed to give law to all things;

nature was rescued from chaos and confusion by their power; the

notes of music, the motions of the stars, the forms of atoms, the

evolution and recurrence of days, months, years, the military

divisions of an army, the civil divisions of a state, seemed to

afford a ‘present witness’ of them—what would have become of man

or of the world if deprived of number (Rep.)? The mystery of

number and the mystery of music were akin. There was a music of

rhythm and of harmonious motion everywhere; and to the real

connexion which existed between music and number, a fanciful or

imaginary relation was superadded. There was a music of the

spheres as well as of the notes of the lyre. If in all things

seen there was number and figure, why should they not also

pervade the unseen world, with which by their wonderful and

unchangeable nature they seemed to hold communion?

Two other points strike us in the use which the ancient

philosophers made of numbers. First, they applied to external

nature the relations of them which they found in their own minds;

and where nature seemed to be at variance with number, as for

example in the case of fractions, they protested against her

(Rep.; Arist. Metaph.). Having long meditated on the properties

of 1:2:4:8, or 1:3:9:27, or of 3, 4, 5, they discovered in them

many curious correspondences and were disposed to find in them

the secret of the universe. Secondly, they applied number and

figure equally to those parts of physics, such as astronomy or

mechanics, in which the modern philosopher expects to find them,

and to those in which he would never think of looking for them,

such as physiology and psychology. For the sciences were not yet

divided, and there was nothing really irrational in arguing that

the same laws which regulated the heavenly bodies were partially

applied to the erring limbs or brain of man. Astrology was the

form which the lively fancy of ancient thinkers almost

necessarily gave to astronomy. The observation that the lower

principle, e.g. mechanics, is always seen in the higher, e.g. in

the phenomena of life, further tended to perplex them. Plato’s

doctrine of the same and the other ruling the courses of the

heavens and of the human body is not a mere vagary, but is a

natural result of the state of knowledge and thought at which he

had arrived.

When in modern times we contemplate the heavens, a certain amount

of scientific truth imperceptibly blends, even with the cursory

glance of an unscientific person. He knows that the earth is

revolving round the sun, and not the sun around the earth. He

does not imagine the earth to be the centre of the universe, and

he has some conception of chemistry and the cognate sciences. A

very different aspect of nature would have been present to the

mind of the early Greek philosopher. He would have beheld the

earth a surface only, not mirrored, however faintly, in the glass

of science, but indissolubly connected with some theory of one,

two, or more elements. He would have seen the world pervaded by

number and figure, animated by a principle of motion, immanent in

a principle of rest. He would have tried to construct the

universe on a quantitative principle, seeming to find in endless

combinations of geometrical figures or in the infinite variety of

their sizes a sufficient account of the multiplicity of

phenomena. To these a priori speculations he would add a rude

conception of matter and his own immediate experience of health

and disease. His cosmos would necessarily be imperfect and

unequal, being the first attempt to impress form and order on the

primaeval chaos of human knowledge. He would see all things as in

a dream.

The ancient physical philosophers have been charged by Dr.

Whewell and others with wasting their fine intelligences in wrong

methods of enquiry; and their progress in moral and political

philosophy has been sometimes contrasted with their supposed

failure in physical investigations. ‘They had plenty of ideas,’

says Dr. Whewell, ‘and plenty of facts; but their ideas did not

accurately represent the facts with which they were acquainted.’

This is a very crude and misleading way of describing ancient

science. It is the mistake of an uneducated person—uneducated,

that is, in the higher sense of the word—who imagines every one

else to be like himself and explains every other age by his own.

No doubt the ancients often fell into strange and fanciful

errors: the time had not yet arrived for the slower and surer

path of the modern inductive philosophy. But it remains to be

shown that they could have done more in their age and country; or

that the contributions which they made to the sciences with which

they were acquainted are not as great upon the whole as those

made by their successors. There is no single step in astronomy as

great as that of the nameless Pythagorean who first conceived the

world to be a body moving round the sun in space: there is no

truer or more comprehensive principle than the application of

mathematics alike to the heavenly bodies, and to the particles of

matter. The ancients had not the instruments which would have

enabled them to correct or verify their anticipations, and their

opportunities of observation were limited. Plato probably did

more for physical science by asserting the supremacy of

mathematics than Aristotle or his disciples by their collections

of facts. When the thinkers of modern times, following Bacon,

undervalue or disparage the speculations of ancient philosophers,

they seem wholly to forget the conditions of the world and of the

human mind, under which they carried on their investigations.

When we accuse them of being under the influence of words, do we

suppose that we are altogether free from this illusion? When we

remark that Greek physics soon became stationary or extinct, may

we not observe also that there have been and may be again periods

in the history of modern philosophy which have been barren and

unproductive? We might as well maintain that Greek art was not

real or great, because it had nihil simile aut secundum, as say

that Greek physics were a failure because they admire no

subsequent progress.

The charge of premature generalization which is often urged

against ancient philosophers is really an anachronism. For they

can hardly be said to have generalized at all. They may be said

more truly to have cleared up and defined by the help of

experience ideas which they already possessed. The beginnings of

thought about nature must always have this character. A true

method is the result of many ages of experiment and observation,

and is ever going on and enlarging with the progress of science

and knowledge. At first men personify nature, then they form

impressions of nature, at last they conceive ‘measure’ or laws of

nature. They pass out of mythology into philosophy. Early science

is not a process of discovery in the modern sense; but rather a

process of correcting by observation, and to a certain extent

only, the first impressions of nature, which mankind, when they

began to think, had received from poetry or language or

unintelligent sense. Of all scientific truths the greatest and

simplest is the uniformity of nature; this was expressed by the

ancients in many ways, as fate, or necessity, or measure, or

limit. Unexpected events, of which the cause was unknown to them,

they attributed to chance (Thucyd.). But their conception of

nature was never that of law interrupted by exceptions,—a

somewhat unfortunate metaphysical invention of modern times,

which is at variance with facts and has failed to satisfy the

requirements of thought.

Plato’s account of the soul is partly mythical or figurative, and

partly literal. Not that either he or we can draw a line between

them, or say, ‘This is poetry, this is philosophy’; for the

transition from the one to the other is imperceptible. Neither

must we expect to find in him absolute consistency. He is apt to

pass from one level or stage of thought to another without always

making it apparent that he is changing his ground. In such

passages we have to interpret his meaning by the general spirit

of his writings. To reconcile his inconsistencies would be

contrary to the first principles of criticism and fatal to any

true understanding of him.

There is a further difficulty in explaining this part of the

Timaeus—the natural order of thought is inverted. We begin with

the most abstract, and proceed from the abstract to the concrete.

We are searching into things which are upon the utmost limit of

human intelligence, and then of a sudden we fall rather heavily

to the earth. There are no intermediate steps which lead from one

to the other. But the abstract is a vacant form to us until

brought into relation with man and nature. God and the world are

mere names, like the Being of the Eleatics, unless some human

qualities are added on to them. Yet the negation has a kind of

unknown meaning to us. The priority of God and of the world,

which he is imagined to have created, to all other existences,

gives a solemn awe to them. And as in other systems of theology

and philosophy, that of which we know least has the greatest

interest to us.

There is no use in attempting to define or explain the first God

in the Platonic system, who has sometimes been thought to answer

to God the Father; or the world, in whom the Fathers of the

Church seemed to recognize ‘the firstborn of every creature.’ Nor

need we discuss at length how far Plato agrees in the later

Jewish idea of creation, according to which God made the world

out of nothing. For his original conception of matter as

something which has no qualities is really a negation. Moreover

in the Hebrew Scriptures the creation of the world is described,

even more explicitly than in the Timaeus, not as a single act,

but as a work or process which occupied six days. There is a

chaos in both, and it would be untrue to say that the Greek, any

more than the Hebrew, had any definite belief in the eternal

existence of matter. The beginning of things vanished into the

distance. The real creation began, not with matter, but with

ideas. According to Plato in the Timaeus, God took of the same

and the other, of the divided and undivided, of the finite and

infinite, and made essence, and out of the three combined created

the soul of the world. To the soul he added a body formed out of

the four elements. The general meaning of these words is that God

imparted determinations of thought, or, as we might say, gave law

and variety to the material universe. The elements are moving in

a disorderly manner before the work of creation begins; and there

is an eternal pattern of the world, which, like the ‘idea of

good,’ is not the Creator himself, but not separable from him.

The pattern too, though eternal, is a creation, a world of

thought prior to the world of sense, which may be compared to the

wisdom of God in the book of Ecclesiasticus, or to the ‘God in

the form of a globe’ of the old Eleatic philosophers. The

visible, which already exists, is fashioned in the likeness of

this eternal pattern. On the other hand, there is no truth of

which Plato is more firmly convinced than of the priority of the

soul to the body, both in the universe and in man. So

inconsistent are the forms in which he describes the works which

no tongue can utter—his language, as he himself says, partaking

of his own uncertainty about the things of which he is speaking.

We may remark in passing, that the Platonic compared with the

Jewish description of the process of creation has less of freedom

or spontaneity. The Creator in Plato is still subject to a

remnant of necessity which he cannot wholly overcome. When his

work is accomplished he remains in his own nature. Plato is more

sensible than the Hebrew prophet of the existence of evil, which

he seeks to put as far as possible out of the way of God. And he

can only suppose this to be accomplished by God retiring into

himself and committing the lesser works of creation to inferior

powers. (Compare, however, Laws for another solution of the

difficulty.)

Nor can we attach any intelligible meaning to his words when he

speaks of the visible being in the image of the invisible. For

how can that which is divided be like that which is undivided? Or

that which is changing be the copy of that which is unchanging?

All the old difficulties about the ideas come back upon us in an

altered form. We can imagine two worlds, one of which is the mere

double of the other, or one of which is an imperfect copy of the

other, or one of which is the vanishing ideal of the other; but

we cannot imagine an intellectual world which has no qualities—‘a

thing in itself’—a point which has no parts or magnitude, which

is nowhere, and nothing. This cannot be the archetype according

to which God made the world, and is in reality, whether in Plato

or in Kant, a mere negative residuum of human thought.

There is another aspect of the same difficulty which appears to

have no satisfactory solution. In what relation does the

archetype stand to the Creator himself? For the idea or pattern

of the world is not the thought of God, but a separate,

self-existent nature, of which creation is the copy. We can only

reply, (1) that to the mind of Plato subject and object were not

yet distinguished; (2) that he supposes the process of creation

to take place in accordance with his own theory of ideas; and as

we cannot give a consistent account of the one, neither can we of

the other. He means (3) to say that the creation of the world is

not a material process of working with legs and arms, but ideal

and intellectual; according to his own fine expression, ‘the

thought of God made the God that was to be.’ He means (4) to draw

an absolute distinction between the invisible or unchangeable

which is or is the place of mind or being, and the world of sense

or becoming which is visible and changing. He means (5) that the

idea of the world is prior to the world, just as the other ideas

are prior to sensible objects; and like them may be regarded as

eternal and self-existent, and also, like the IDEA of good, may

be viewed apart from the divine mind.

There are several other questions which we might ask and which

can receive no answer, or at least only an answer of the same

kind as the preceding. How can matter be conceived to exist

without form? Or, how can the essences or forms of things be

distinguished from the eternal ideas, or essence itself from the

soul? Or, how could there have been motion in the chaos when as

yet time was not? Or, how did chaos come into existence, if not

by the will of the Creator? Or, how could there have been a time

when the world was not, if time was not? Or, how could the

Creator have taken portions of an indivisible same? Or, how could

space or anything else have been eternal when time is only

created? Or, how could the surfaces of geometrical figures have

formed solids? We must reply again that we cannot follow Plato in

all his inconsistencies, but that the gaps of thought are

probably more apparent to us than to him. He would, perhaps, have

said that ‘the first things are known only to God and to him of

men whom God loves.’ How often have the gaps in Theology been

concealed from the eye of faith! And we may say that only by an

effort of metaphysical imagination can we hope to understand

Plato from his own point of view; we must not ask for

consistency. Everywhere we find traces of the Platonic theory of

knowledge expressed in an objective form, which by us has to be

translated into the subjective, before we can attach any meaning

to it. And this theory is exhibited in so many different points

of view, that we cannot with any certainty interpret one dialogue

by another; e.g. the Timaeus by the Parmenides or Phaedrus or

Philebus.

The soul of the world may also be conceived as the

personification of the numbers and figures in which the heavenly

bodies move. Imagine these as in a Pythagorean dream, stripped of

qualitative difference and reduced to mathematical abstractions.

They too conform to the principle of the same, and may be

compared with the modern conception of laws of nature. They are

in space, but not in time, and they are the makers of time. They

are represented as constantly thinking of the same; for thought

in the view of Plato is equivalent to truth or law, and need not

imply a human consciousness, a conception which is familiar

enough to us, but has no place, hardly even a name, in ancient

Greek philosophy. To this principle of the same is opposed the

principle of the other—the principle of irregularity and

disorder, of necessity and chance, which is only partially

impressed by mathematical laws and figures. (We may observe by

the way, that the principle of the other, which is the principle

of plurality and variation in the Timaeus, has nothing in common

with the ‘other’ of the Sophist, which is the principle of

determination.) The element of the same dominates to a certain

extent over the other—the fixed stars keep the ‘wanderers’ of the

inner circle in their courses, and a similar principle of

fixedness or order appears to regulate the bodily constitution of

man. But there still remains a rebellious seed of evil derived

from the original chaos, which is the source of disorder in the

world, and of vice and disease in man.

But what did Plato mean by essence, (Greek), which is the

intermediate nature compounded of the Same and the Other, and out

of which, together with these two, the soul of the world is

created? It is difficult to explain a process of thought so

strange and unaccustomed to us, in which modern distinctions run

into one another and are lost sight of. First, let us consider

once more the meaning of the Same and the Other. The Same is the

unchanging and indivisible, the heaven of the fixed stars,

partaking of the divine nature, which, having law in itself,

gives law to all besides and is the element of order and

permanence in man and on the earth. It is the rational principle,

mind regarded as a work, as creation—not as the creator. The old

tradition of Parmenides and of the Eleatic Being, the foundation

of so much in the philosophy of Greece and of the world, was

lingering in Plato’s mind. The Other is the variable or changing

element, the residuum of disorder or chaos, which cannot be

reduced to order, nor altogether banished, the source of evil,

seen in the errors of man and also in the wanderings of the

planets, a necessity which protrudes through nature. Of this too

there was a shadow in the Eleatic philosophy in the realm of

opinion, which, like a mist, seemed to darken the purity of truth

in itself.—So far the words of Plato may perhaps find an

intelligible meaning. But when he goes on to speak of the Essence

which is compounded out of both, the track becomes fainter and we

can only follow him with hesitating steps. But still we find a

trace reappearing of the teaching of Anaxagoras: ‘All was

confusion, and then mind came and arranged things.’ We have

already remarked that Plato was not acquainted with the modern

distinction of subject and object, and therefore he sometimes

confuses mind and the things of mind—(Greek) and (Greek). By

(Greek) he clearly means some conception of the intelligible and

the intelligent; it belongs to the class of (Greek). Matter,

being, the Same, the eternal,—for any of these terms, being

almost vacant of meaning, is equally suitable to express

indefinite existence,—are compared or united with the Other or

Diverse, and out of the union or comparison is elicited the idea

of intelligence, the ‘One in many,’ brighter than any Promethean

fire (Phil.), which co-existing with them and so forming a new

existence, is or becomes the intelligible world...So we may

perhaps venture to paraphrase or interpret or put into other

words the parable in which Plato has wrapped up his conception of

the creation of the world. The explanation may help to fill up

with figures of speech the void of knowledge.

The entire compound was divided by the Creator in certain

proportions and reunited; it was then cut into two strips, which

were bent into an inner circle and an outer, both moving with an

uniform motion around a centre, the outer circle containing the

fixed, the inner the wandering stars. The soul of the world was

diffused everywhere from the centre to the circumference. To this

God gave a body, consisting at first of fire and earth, and

afterwards receiving an addition of air and water; because solid

bodies, like the world, are always connected by two middle terms

and not by one. The world was made in the form of a globe, and

all the material elements were exhausted in the work of creation.

The proportions in which the soul of the world as well as the

human soul is divided answer to a series of numbers 1, 2, 3, 4,

9, 8, 27, composed of the two Pythagorean progressions 1, 2, 4, 8

and 1, 3, 9, 27, of which the number 1 represents a point, 2 and

3 lines, 4 and 8, 9 and 27 the squares and cubes respectively of

2 and 3. This series, of which the intervals are afterwards

filled up, probably represents (1) the diatonic scale according

to the Pythagoreans and Plato; (2) the order and distances of the

heavenly bodies; and (3) may possibly contain an allusion to the

music of the spheres, which is referred to in the myth at the end

of the Republic. The meaning of the words that ‘solid bodies are

always connected by two middle terms’ or mean proportionals has

been much disputed. The most received explanation is that of

Martin, who supposes that Plato is only speaking of surfaces and

solids compounded of prime numbers (i.e. of numbers not made up

of two factors, or, in other words, only measurable by unity).

The square of any such number represents a surface, the cube a

solid. The squares of any two such numbers (e.g. 2 squared, 3

squared = 4, 9), have always a single mean proportional (e.g. 4

and 9 have the single mean 6), whereas the cubes of primes (e.g.

3 cubed and 5 cubed) have always two mean proportionals (e.g.

27:45:75:125). But to this explanation of Martin’s it may be

objected, (1) that Plato nowhere says that his proportion is to

be limited to prime numbers; (2) that the limitation of surfaces

to squares is also not to be found in his words; nor (3) is there

any evidence to show that the distinction of prime from other

numbers was known to him. What Plato chiefly intends to express

is that a solid requires a stronger bond than a surface; and that

the double bond which is given by two means is stronger than the

single bond given by one. Having reflected on the singular

numerical phenomena of the existence of one mean proportional

between two square numbers are rather perhaps only between the

two lowest squares; and of two mean proportionals between two

cubes, perhaps again confining his attention to the two lowest

cubes, he finds in the latter symbol an expression of the

relation of the elements, as in the former an image of the

combination of two surfaces. Between fire and earth, the two

extremes, he remarks that there are introduced, not one, but two

elements, air and water, which are compared to the two mean

proportionals between two cube numbers. The vagueness of his

language does not allow us to determine whether anything more

than this was intended by him.

Leaving the further explanation of details, which the reader will

find discussed at length in Boeckh and Martin, we may now return

to the main argument: Why did God make the world? Like man, he

must have a purpose; and his purpose is the diffusion of that

goodness or good which he himself is. The term ‘goodness’ is not

to be understood in this passage as meaning benevolence or love,

in the Christian sense of the term, but rather law, order,

harmony, like the idea of good in the Republic. The ancient

mythologers, and even the Hebrew prophets, had spoken of the

jealousy of God; and the Greek had imagined that there was a

Nemesis always attending the prosperity of mortals. But Plato

delights to think of God as the author of order in his works,

who, like a father, lives over again in his children, and can

never have too much of good or friendship among his creatures.

Only, as there is a certain remnant of evil inherent in matter

which he cannot get rid of, he detaches himself from them and

leaves them to themselves, that he may be guiltless of their

faults and sufferings.

Between the ideal and the sensible Plato interposes the two

natures of time and space. Time is conceived by him to be only

the shadow or image of eternity which ever is and never has been

or will be, but is described in a figure only as past or future.

This is one of the great thoughts of early philosophy, which are

still as difficult to our minds as they were to the early

thinkers; or perhaps more difficult, because we more distinctly

see the consequences which are involved in such an hypothesis.

All the objections which may be urged against Kant’s doctrine of

the ideality of space and time at once press upon us. If time is

unreal, then all which is contained in time is unreal—the

succession of human thoughts as well as the flux of sensations;

there is no connecting link between (Greek) and (Greek). Yet, on

the other hand, we are conscious that knowledge is independent of

time, that truth is not a thing of yesterday or tomorrow, but an

‘eternal now.’ To the ‘spectator of all time and all existence’

the universe remains at rest. The truths of geometry and

arithmetic in all their combinations are always the same. The

generations of men, like the leaves of the forest, come and go,

but the mathematical laws by which the world is governed remain,

and seem as if they could never change. The ever-present image of

space is transferred to time—succession is conceived as

extension. (We remark that Plato does away with the above and

below in space, as he has done away with the absolute existence

of past and future.) The course of time, unless regularly marked

by divisions of number, partakes of the indefiniteness of the

Heraclitean flux. By such reflections we may conceive the Greek

to have attained the metaphysical conception of eternity, which

to the Hebrew was gained by meditation on the Divine Being. No

one saw that this objective was really a subjective, and involved

the subjectivity of all knowledge. ‘Non in tempore sed cum

tempore finxit Deus mundum,’ says St. Augustine, repeating a

thought derived from the Timaeus, but apparently unconscious of

the results to which his doctrine would have led.

The contradictions involved in the conception of time or motion,

like the infinitesimal in space, were a source of perplexity to

the mind of the Greek, who was driven to find a point of view

above or beyond them. They had sprung up in the decline of the

Eleatic philosophy and were very familiar to Plato, as we gather

from the Parmenides. The consciousness of them had led the great

Eleatic philosopher to describe the nature of God or Being under

negatives. He sings of ‘Being unbegotten and imperishable,

unmoved and never-ending, which never was nor will be, but always

is, one and continuous, which cannot spring from any other; for

it cannot be said or imagined not to be.’ The idea of eternity

was for a great part a negation. There are regions of speculation

in which the negative is hardly separable from the positive, and

even seems to pass into it. Not only Buddhism, but Greek as well

as Christian philosophy, show that it is quite possible that the

human mind should retain an enthusiasm for mere negations. In

different ages and countries there have been forms of light in

which nothing could be discerned and which have nevertheless

exercised a life-giving and illumining power. For the higher

intelligence of man seems to require, not only something above

sense, but above knowledge, which can only be described as Mind

or Being or Truth or God or the unchangeable and eternal element,

in the expression of which all predicates fail and fall short.

Eternity or the eternal is not merely the unlimited in time but

the truest of all Being, the most real of all realities, the most

certain of all knowledge, which we nevertheless only see through

a glass darkly. The passionate earnestness of Parmenides

contrasts with the vacuity of the thought which he is revolving

in his mind.

Space is said by Plato to be the ‘containing vessel or nurse of

generation.’ Reflecting on the simplest kinds of external

objects, which to the ancients were the four elements, he was led

to a more general notion of a substance, more or less like

themselves, out of which they were fashioned. He would not have

them too precisely distinguished. Thus seems to have arisen the

first dim perception of (Greek) or matter, which has played so

great a part in the metaphysical philosophy of Aristotle and his

followers. But besides the material out of which the elements are

made, there is also a space in which they are contained. There

arises thus a second nature which the senses are incapable of

discerning and which can hardly be referred to the intelligible

class. For it is and it is not, it is nowhere when filled, it is

nothing when empty. Hence it is said to be discerned by a kind of

spurious or analogous reason, partaking so feebly of existence as

to be hardly perceivable, yet always reappearing as the

containing mother or nurse of all things. It had not that sort of

consistency to Plato which has been given to it in modern times

by geometry and metaphysics. Neither of the Greek words by which

it is described are so purely abstract as the English word

‘space’ or the Latin ‘spatium.’ Neither Plato nor any other Greek

would have spoken of (Greek) or (Greek) in the same manner as we

speak of ‘time’ and ‘space.’

Yet space is also of a very permanent or even eternal nature; and

Plato seems more willing to admit of the unreality of time than

of the unreality of space; because, as he says, all things must

necessarily exist in space. We, on the other hand, are disposed

to fancy that even if space were annihilated time might still

survive. He admits indeed that our knowledge of space is of a

dreamy kind, and is given by a spurious reason without the help

of sense. (Compare the hypotheses and images of Rep.) It is true

that it does not attain to the clearness of ideas. But like them

it seems to remain, even if all the objects contained in it are

supposed to have vanished away. Hence it was natural for Plato to

conceive of it as eternal. We must remember further that in his

attempt to realize either space or matter the two abstract ideas

of weight and extension, which are familiar to us, had never

passed before his mind.

Thus far God, working according to an eternal pattern, out of his

goodness has created the same, the other, and the essence

(compare the three principles of the Philebus—the finite, the

infinite, and the union of the two), and out of them has formed

the outer circle of the fixed stars and the inner circle of the

planets, divided according to certain musical intervals; he has

also created time, the moving image of eternity, and space,

existing by a sort of necessity and hardly distinguishable from

matter. The matter out of which the world is formed is not

absolutely void, but retains in the chaos certain germs or traces

of the elements. These Plato, like Empedocles, supposed to be

four in number—fire, air, earth, and water. They were at first

mixed together; but already in the chaos, before God fashioned

them by form and number, the greater masses of the elements had

an appointed place. Into the confusion (Greek) which preceded

Plato does not attempt further to penetrate. They are called

elements, but they are so far from being elements (Greek) or

letters in the higher sense that they are not even syllables or

first compounds. The real elements are two triangles, the

rectangular isosceles which has but one form, and the most

beautiful of the many forms of scalene, which is half of an

equilateral triangle. By the combination of these triangles which

exist in an infinite variety of sizes, the surfaces of the four

elements are constructed.

That there were only five regular solids was already known to the

ancients, and out of the surfaces which he has formed Plato

proceeds to generate the four first of the five. He perhaps

forgets that he is only putting together surfaces and has not

provided for their transformation into solids. The first solid is

a regular pyramid, of which the base and sides are formed by four

equilateral or twenty-four scalene triangles. Each of the four

solid angles in this figure is a little larger than the largest

of obtuse angles. The second solid is composed of the same

triangles, which unite as eight equilateral triangles, and make

one solid angle out of four plane angles—six of these angles form

a regular octahedron. The third solid is a regular icosahedron,

having twenty triangular equilateral bases, and therefore 120

rectangular scalene triangles. The fourth regular solid, or cube,

is formed by the combination of four isosceles triangles into one

square and of six squares into a cube. The fifth regular solid,

or dodecahedron, cannot be formed by a combination of either of

these triangles, but each of its faces may be regarded as

composed of thirty triangles of another kind. Probably Plato

notices this as the only remaining regular polyhedron, which from

its approximation to a globe, and possibly because, as Plutarch

remarks, it is composed of 12 x 30 = 360 scalene triangles

(Platon. Quaest.), representing thus the signs and degrees of the

Zodiac, as well as the months and days of the year, God may be

said to have ‘used in the delineation of the universe.’ According

to Plato earth was composed of cubes, fire of regular pyramids,

air of regular octahedrons, water of regular icosahedrons. The

stability of the last three increases with the number of their

sides.

The elements are supposed to pass into one another, but we must

remember that these transformations are not the transformations

of real solids, but of imaginary geometrical figures; in other

words, we are composing and decomposing the faces of substances

and not the substances themselves—it is a house of cards which we

are pulling to pieces and putting together again (compare however

Laws). Yet perhaps Plato may regard these sides or faces as only

the forms which are impressed on pre-existent matter. It is

remarkable that he should speak of each of these solids as a

possible world in itself, though upon the whole he inclines to

the opinion that they form one world and not five. To suppose

that there is an infinite number of worlds, as Democritus

(Hippolyt. Ref. Haer. I.) had said, would be, as he satirically

observes, ‘the characteristic of a very indefinite and ignorant

mind.’

The twenty triangular faces of an icosahedron form the faces or

sides of two regular octahedrons and of a regular pyramid (20 = 8

x 2 + 4); and therefore, according to Plato, a particle of water

when decomposed is supposed to give two particles of air and one

of fire. So because an octahedron gives the sides of two pyramids

(8 = 4 x 2), a particle of air is resolved into two particles of

fire.

The transformation is effected by the superior power or number of

the conquering elements. The manner of the change is (1) a

separation of portions of the elements from the masses in which

they are collected; (2) a resolution of them into their original

triangles; and (3) a reunion of them in new forms. Plato himself

proposes the question, Why does motion continue at all when the

elements are settled in their places? He answers that although

the force of attraction is continually drawing similar elements

to the same spot, still the revolution of the universe exercises

a condensing power, and thrusts them again out of their natural

places. Thus want of uniformity, the condition of motion, is

produced. In all such disturbances of matter there is an

alternative for the weaker element: it may escape to its kindred,

or take the form of the stronger—becoming denser, if it be

denser, or rarer if rarer. This is true of fire, air, and water,

which, being composed of similar triangles, are interchangeable;

earth, however, which has triangles peculiar to itself, is

capable of dissolution, but not of change. Of the interchangeable

elements, fire, the rarest, can only become a denser, and water,

the densest, only a rarer: but air may become a denser or a

rarer. No single particle of the elements is visible, but only

the aggregates of them are seen. The subordinate species depend,

not upon differences of form in the original triangles, but upon

differences of size. The obvious physical phenomena from which

Plato has gathered his views of the relations of the elements

seem to be the effect of fire upon air, water, and earth, and the

effect of water upon earth. The particles are supposed by him to

be in a perpetual process of circulation caused by inequality.

This process of circulation does not admit of a vacuum, as he

tells us in his strange account of respiration.

Of the phenomena of light and heavy he speaks afterwards, when

treating of sensation, but they may be more conveniently

considered by us in this place. They are not, he says, to be

explained by ‘above’ and ‘below,’ which in the universal globe

have no existence, but by the attraction of similars towards the

great masses of similar substances; fire to fire, air to air,

water to water, earth to earth. Plato’s doctrine of attraction

implies not only (1) the attraction of similar elements to one

another, but also (2) of smaller bodies to larger ones. Had he

confined himself to the latter he would have arrived, though,

perhaps, without any further result or any sense of the greatness

of the discovery, at the modern doctrine of gravitation. He does

not observe that water has an equal tendency towards both water

and earth. So easily did the most obvious facts which were

inconsistent with his theories escape him.

The general physical doctrines of the Timaeus may be summed up as

follows: (1) Plato supposes the greater masses of the elements to

have been already settled in their places at the creation: (2)

they are four in number, and are formed of rectangular triangles

variously combined into regular solid figures: (3) three of them,

fire, air, and water, admit of transformation into one another;

the fourth, earth, cannot be similarly transformed: (4) different

sizes of the same triangles form the lesser species of each

element: (5) there is an attraction of like to like—smaller

masses of the same kind being drawn towards greater: (6) there is

no void, but the particles of matter are ever pushing one another

round and round (Greek). Like the atomists, Plato attributes the

differences between the elements to differences in geometrical

figures. But he does not explain the process by which surfaces

become solids; and he characteristically ridicules Democritus for

not seeing that the worlds are finite and not infinite.

The astronomy of Plato is based on the two principles of the same

and the other, which God combined in the creation of the world.

The soul, which is compounded of the same, the other, and the

essence, is diffused from the centre to the circumference of the

heavens. We speak of a soul of the universe; but more truly

regarded, the universe of the Timaeus is a soul, governed by

mind, and holding in solution a residuum of matter or evil, which

the author of the world is unable to expel, and of which Plato

cannot tell us the origin. The creation, in Plato’s sense, is

really the creation of order; and the first step in giving order

is the division of the heavens into an inner and outer circle of

the other and the same, of the divisible and the indivisible,

answering to the two spheres, of the planets and of the world

beyond them, all together moving around the earth, which is their

centre. To us there is a difficulty in apprehending how that

which is at rest can also be in motion, or that which is

indivisible exist in space. But the whole description is so ideal

and imaginative, that we can hardly venture to attribute to many

of Plato’s words in the Timaeus any more meaning than to his

mythical account of the heavens in the Republic and in the

Phaedrus. (Compare his denial of the ‘blasphemous opinion’ that

there are planets or wandering stars; all alike move in

circles—Laws.) The stars are the habitations of the souls of men,

from which they come and to which they return. In attributing to

the fixed stars only the most perfect motion—that which is on the

same spot or circulating around the same—he might perhaps have

said that to ‘the spectator of all time and all existence,’ to

borrow once more his own grand expression, or viewed, in the

language of Spinoza, ‘sub specie aeternitatis,’ they were still

at rest, but appeared to move in order to teach men the periods

of time. Although absolutely in motion, they are relatively at

rest; or we may conceive of them as resting, while the space in

which they are contained, or the whole anima mundi, revolves.

The universe revolves around a centre once in twenty-four hours,

but the orbits of the fixed stars take a different direction from

those of the planets. The outer and the inner sphere cross one

another and meet again at a point opposite to that of their first

contact; the first moving in a circle from left to right along

the side of a parallelogram which is supposed to be inscribed in

it, the second also moving in a circle along the diagonal of the

same parallelogram from right to left; or, in other words, the

first describing the path of the equator, the second, the path of

the ecliptic. The motion of the second is controlled by the

first, and hence the oblique line in which the planets are

supposed to move becomes a spiral. The motion of the same is said

to be undivided, whereas the inner motion is split into seven

unequal orbits—the intervals between them being in the ratio of

two and three, three of either:—the Sun, moving in the opposite

direction to Mercury and Venus, but with equal swiftness; the

remaining four, Moon, Saturn, Mars, Jupiter, with unequal

swiftness to the former three and to one another. Thus arises the

following progression:—Moon 1, Sun 2, Venus 3, Mercury 4, Mars 8,

Jupiter 9, Saturn 27. This series of numbers is the compound of

the two Pythagorean ratios, having the same intervals, though not

in the same order, as the mixture which was originally divided in

forming the soul of the world.

Plato was struck by the phenomenon of Mercury, Venus, and the Sun

appearing to overtake and be overtaken by one another. The true

reason of this, namely, that they lie within the circle of the

earth’s orbit, was unknown to him, and the reason which he

gives—that the two former move in an opposite direction to the

latter—is far from explaining the appearance of them in the

heavens. All the planets, including the sun, are carried round in

the daily motion of the circle of the fixed stars, and they have

a second or oblique motion which gives the explanation of the

different lengths of the sun’s course in different parts of the

earth. The fixed stars have also two movements—a forward movement

in their orbit which is common to the whole circle; and a

movement on the same spot around an axis, which Plato calls the

movement of thought about the same. In this latter respect they

are more perfect than the wandering stars, as Plato himself terms

them in the Timaeus, although in the Laws he condemns the

appellation as blasphemous.

The revolution of the world around earth, which is accomplished

in a single day and night, is described as being the most perfect

or intelligent. Yet Plato also speaks of an ‘annus magnus’ or

cyclical year, in which periods wonderful for their complexity

are found to coincide in a perfect number, i.e. a number which

equals the sum of its factors, as 6 = 1 + 2 + 3. This, although

not literally contradictory, is in spirit irreconcilable with the

perfect revolution of twenty-four hours. The same remark may be

applied to the complexity of the appearances and occultations of

the stars, which, if the outer heaven is supposed to be moving

around the centre once in twenty-four hours, must be confined to

the effects produced by the seven planets. Plato seems to confuse

the actual observation of the heavens with his desire to find in

them mathematical perfection. The same spirit is carried yet

further by him in the passage already quoted from the Laws, in

which he affirms their wanderings to be an appearance only, which

a little knowledge of mathematics would enable men to correct.

We have now to consider the much discussed question of the

rotation or immobility of the earth. Plato’s doctrine on this

subject is contained in the following words:—‘The earth, which is

our nurse, compacted (OR revolving) around the pole which is

extended through the universe, he made to be the guardian and

artificer of night and day, first and eldest of gods that are in

the interior of heaven’. There is an unfortunate doubt in this

passage (1) about the meaning of the word (Greek), which is

translated either ‘compacted’ or ‘revolving,’ and is equally

capable of both explanations. A doubt (2) may also be raised as

to whether the words ‘artificer of day and night’ are consistent

with the mere passive causation of them, produced by the

immobility of the earth in the midst of the circling universe. We

must admit, further, (3) that Aristotle attributed to Plato the

doctrine of the rotation of the earth on its axis. On the other

hand it has been urged that if the earth goes round with the

outer heaven and sun in twenty-four hours, there is no way of

accounting for the alternation of day and night; since the equal

motion of the earth and sun would have the effect of absolute

immobility. To which it may be replied that Plato never says that

the earth goes round with the outer heaven and sun; although the

whole question depends on the relation of earth and sun, their

movements are nowhere precisely described. But if we suppose,

with Mr. Grote, that the diurnal rotation of the earth on its

axis and the revolution of the sun and outer heaven precisely

coincide, it would be difficult to imagine that Plato was unaware

of the consequence. For though he was ignorant of many things

which are familiar to us, and often confused in his ideas where

we have become clear, we have no right to attribute to him a

childish want of reasoning about very simple facts, or an

inability to understand the necessary and obvious deductions from

geometrical figures or movements. Of the causes of day and night

the pre-Socratic philosophers, and especially the Pythagoreans,

gave various accounts, and therefore the question can hardly be

imagined to have escaped him. On the other hand it may be urged

that the further step, however simple and obvious, is just what

Plato often seems to be ignorant of, and that as there is no

limit to his insight, there is also no limit to the blindness

which sometimes obscures his intelligence (compare the

construction of solids out of surfaces in his account of the

creation of the world, or the attraction of similars to

similars). Further, Mr. Grote supposes, not that (Greek) means

‘revolving,’ or that this is the sense in which Aristotle

understood the word, but that the rotation of the earth is

necessarily implied in its adherence to the cosmical axis. But

(a) if, as Mr Grote assumes, Plato did not see that the rotation

of the earth on its axis and of the sun and outer heavens around

the earth in equal times was inconsistent with the alternation of

day and night, neither need we suppose that he would have seen

the immobility of the earth to be inconsistent with the rotation

of the axis. And (b) what proof is there that the axis of the

world revolves at all? (c) The comparison of the two passages

quoted by Mr Grote (see his pamphlet on ‘The Rotation of the

Earth’) from Aristotle De Coelo, Book II (Greek) clearly shows,

although this is a matter of minor importance, that Aristotle, as

Proclus and Simplicius supposed, understood (Greek) in the

Timaeus to mean ‘revolving.’ For the second passage, in which

motion on an axis is expressly mentioned, refers to the first,

but this would be unmeaning unless (Greek) in the first passage

meant rotation on an axis. (4) The immobility of the earth is

more in accordance with Plato’s other writings than the opposite

hypothesis. For in the Phaedo the earth is described as the

centre of the world, and is not said to be in motion. In the

Republic the pilgrims appear to be looking out from the earth

upon the motions of the heavenly bodies; in the Phaedrus, Hestia,

who remains immovable in the house of Zeus while the other gods

go in procession, is called the first and eldest of the gods, and

is probably the symbol of the earth. The silence of Plato in

these and in some other passages (Laws) in which he might be

expected to speak of the rotation of the earth, is more

favourable to the doctrine of its immobility than to the

opposite. If he had meant to say that the earth revolves on its

axis, he would have said so in distinct words, and have explained

the relation of its movements to those of the other heavenly

bodies. (5) The meaning of the words ‘artificer of day and night’

is literally true according to Plato’s view. For the alternation

of day and night is not produced by the motion of the heavens

alone, or by the immobility of the earth alone, but by both

together; and that which has the inherent force or energy to

remain at rest when all other bodies are moving, may be truly

said to act, equally with them. (6) We should not lay too much

stress on Aristotle or the writer De Caelo having adopted the

other interpretation of the words, although Alexander of

Aphrodisias thinks that he could not have been ignorant either of

the doctrine of Plato or of the sense which he intended to give

to the word (Greek). For the citations of Plato in Aristotle are

frequently misinterpreted by him; and he seems hardly ever to

have had in his mind the connection in which they occur. In this

instance the allusion is very slight, and there is no reason to

suppose that the diurnal revolution of the heavens was present to

his mind. Hence we need not attribute to him the error from which

we are defending Plato.

After weighing one against the other all these complicated

probabilities, the final conclusion at which we arrive is that

there is nearly as much to be said on the one side of the

question as on the other, and that we are not perfectly certain,

whether, as Bockh and the majority of commentators, ancient as

well as modern, are inclined to believe, Plato thought that the

earth was at rest in the centre of the universe, or, as Aristotle

and Mr. Grote suppose, that it revolved on its axis. Whether we

assume the earth to be stationary in the centre of the universe,

or to revolve with the heavens, no explanation is given of the

variation in the length of days and nights at different times of

the year. The relations of the earth and heavens are so

indistinct in the Timaeus and so figurative in the Phaedo,

Phaedrus and Republic, that we must give up the hope of

ascertaining how they were imagined by Plato, if he had any fixed

or scientific conception of them at all.

The soul of the world is framed on the analogy of the soul of

man, and many traces of anthropomorphism blend with Plato’s

highest flights of idealism. The heavenly bodies are endowed with

thought; the principles of the same and other exist in the

universe as well as in the human mind. The soul of man is made

out of the remains of the elements which had been used in

creating the soul of the world; these remains, however, are

diluted to the third degree; by this Plato expresses the measure

of the difference between the soul human and divine. The human

soul, like the cosmical, is framed before the body, as the mind

is before the soul of either—this is the order of the divine

work—and the finer parts of the body, which are more akin to the

soul, such as the spinal marrow, are prior to the bones and

flesh. The brain, the containing vessel of the divine part of the

soul, is (nearly) in the form of a globe, which is the image of

the gods, who are the stars, and of the universe.

There is, however, an inconsistency in Plato’s manner of

conceiving the soul of man; he cannot get rid of the element of

necessity which is allowed to enter. He does not, like Kant,

attempt to vindicate for men a freedom out of space and time; but

he acknowledges him to be subject to the influence of external

causes, and leaves hardly any place for freedom of the will. The

lusts of men are caused by their bodily constitution, though they

may be increased by bad education and bad laws, which implies

that they may be decreased by good education and good laws. He

appears to have an inkling of the truth that to the higher nature

of man evil is involuntary. This is mixed up with the view which,

while apparently agreeing with it, is in reality the opposite of

it, that vice is due to physical causes. In the Timaeus, as well

as in the Laws, he also regards vices and crimes as simply

involuntary; they are diseases analogous to the diseases of the

body, and arising out of the same causes. If we draw together the

opposite poles of Plato’s system, we find that, like Spinoza, he

combines idealism with fatalism.

The soul of man is divided by him into three parts, answering

roughly to the charioteer and steeds of the Phaedrus, and to the

(Greek) of the Republic and Nicomachean Ethics. First, there is

the immortal nature of which the brain is the seat, and which is

akin to the soul of the universe. This alone thinks and knows and

is the ruler of the whole. Secondly, there is the higher mortal

soul which, though liable to perturbations of her own, takes the

side of reason against the lower appetites. The seat of this is

the heart, in which courage, anger, and all the nobler affections

are supposed to reside. There the veins all meet; it is their

centre or house of guard whence they carry the orders of the

thinking being to the extremities of his kingdom. There is also a

third or appetitive soul, which receives the commands of the

immortal part, not immediately but mediately, through the liver,

which reflects on its surface the admonitions and threats of the

reason.

The liver is imagined by Plato to be a smooth and bright

substance, having a store of sweetness and also of bitterness,

which reason freely uses in the execution of her mandates. In

this region, as ancient superstition told, were to be found

intimations of the future. But Plato is careful to observe that

although such knowledge is given to the inferior parts of man, it

requires to be interpreted by the superior. Reason, and not

enthusiasm, is the true guide of man; he is only inspired when he

is demented by some distemper or possession. The ancient saying,

that ‘only a man in his senses can judge of his own actions,’ is

approved by modern philosophy too. The same irony which appears

in Plato’s remark, that ‘the men of old time must surely have

known the gods who were their ancestors, and we should believe

them as custom requires,’ is also manifest in his account of

divination.

The appetitive soul is seated in the belly, and there imprisoned

like a wild beast, far away from the council chamber, as Plato

graphically calls the head, in order that the animal passions may

not interfere with the deliberations of reason. Though the soul

is said by him to be prior to the body, yet we cannot help seeing

that it is constructed on the model of the body—the threefold

division into the rational, passionate, and appetitive

corresponding to the head, heart and belly. The human soul

differs from the soul of the world in this respect, that it is

enveloped and finds its expression in matter, whereas the soul of

the world is not only enveloped or diffused in matter, but is the

element in which matter moves. The breath of man is within him,

but the air or aether of heaven is the element which surrounds

him and all things.

Pleasure and pain are attributed in the Timaeus to the suddenness

of our sensations—the first being a sudden restoration, the

second a sudden violation, of nature (Phileb.). The sensations

become conscious to us when they are exceptional. Sight is not

attended either by pleasure or pain, but hunger and the appeasing

of hunger are pleasant and painful because they are

extraordinary.

I shall not attempt to connect the physiological speculations of

Plato either with ancient or modern medicine. What light I can

throw upon them will be derived from the comparison of them with

his general system.

There is no principle so apparent in the physics of the Timaeus,

or in ancient physics generally, as that of continuity. The world

is conceived of as a whole, and the elements are formed into and

out of one another; the varieties of substances and processes are

hardly known or noticed. And in a similar manner the human body

is conceived of as a whole, and the different substances of

which, to a superficial observer, it appears to be composed—the

blood, flesh, sinews—like the elements out of which they are

formed, are supposed to pass into one another in regular order,

while the infinite complexity of the human frame remains

unobserved. And diseases arise from the opposite process—when the

natural proportions of the four elements are disturbed, and the

secondary substances which are formed out of them, namely, blood,

flesh, sinews, are generated in an inverse order.

Plato found heat and air within the human frame, and the blood

circulating in every part. He assumes in language almost

unintelligible to us that a network of fire and air envelopes the

greater part of the body. This outer net contains two lesser

nets, one corresponding to the stomach, the other to the lungs;

and the entrance to the latter is forked or divided into two

passages which lead to the nostrils and to the mouth. In the

process of respiration the external net is said to find a way in

and out of the pores of the skin: while the interior of it and

the lesser nets move alternately into each other. The whole

description is figurative, as Plato himself implies when he

speaks of a ‘fountain of fire which we compare to the network of

a creel.’ He really means by this what we should describe as a

state of heat or temperature in the interior of the body. The

‘fountain of fire’ or heat is also in a figure the circulation of

the blood. The passage is partly imagination, partly fact.

He has a singular theory of respiration for which he accounts

solely by the movement of the air in and out of the body; he does

not attribute any part of the process to the action of the body

itself. The air has a double ingress and a double exit, through

the mouth or nostrils, and through the skin. When exhaled through

the mouth or nostrils, it leaves a vacuum which is filled up by

other air finding a way in through the pores, this air being

thrust out of its place by the exhalation from the mouth and

nostrils. There is also a corresponding process of inhalation

through the mouth or nostrils, and of exhalation through the

pores. The inhalation through the pores appears to take place

nearly at the same time as the exhalation through the mouth; and

conversely. The internal fire is in either case the propelling

cause outwards—the inhaled air, when heated by it, having a

natural tendency to move out of the body to the place of fire;

while the impossibility of a vacuum is the propelling cause

inwards.

Thus we see that this singular theory is dependent on two

principles largely employed by Plato in explaining the operations

of nature, the impossibility of a vacuum and the attraction of

like to like. To these there has to be added a third principle,

which is the condition of the action of the other two,—the

interpenetration of particles in proportion to their density or

rarity. It is this which enables fire and air to permeate the

flesh.

Plato’s account of digestion and the circulation of the blood is

closely connected with his theory of respiration. Digestion is

supposed to be effected by the action of the internal fire, which

in the process of respiration moves into the stomach and minces

the food. As the fire returns to its place, it takes with it the

minced food or blood; and in this way the veins are replenished.

Plato does not enquire how the blood is separated from the

faeces.

Of the anatomy and functions of the body he knew very

little,—e.g. of the uses of the nerves in conveying motion and

sensation, which he supposed to be communicated by the bones and

veins; he was also ignorant of the distinction between veins and

arteries;—the latter term he applies to the vessels which conduct

air from the mouth to the lungs;—he supposes the lung to be

hollow and bloodless; the spinal marrow he conceives to be the

seed of generation; he confuses the parts of the body with the

states of the body—the network of fire and air is spoken of as a

bodily organ; he has absolutely no idea of the phenomena of

respiration, which he attributes to a law of equalization in

nature, the air which is breathed out displacing other air which

finds a way in; he is wholly unacquainted with the process of

digestion. Except the general divisions into the spleen, the

liver, the belly, and the lungs, and the obvious distinctions of

flesh, bones, and the limbs of the body, we find nothing that

reminds us of anatomical facts. But we find much which is derived

from his theory of the universe, and transferred to man, as there

is much also in his theory of the universe which is suggested by

man. The microcosm of the human body is the lesser image of the

macrocosm. The courses of the same and the other affect both;

they are made of the same elements and therefore in the same

proportions. Both are intelligent natures endued with the power

of self-motion, and the same equipoise is maintained in both. The

animal is a sort of ‘world’ to the particles of the blood which

circulate in it. All the four elements entered into the original

composition of the human frame; the bone was formed out of smooth

earth; liquids of various kinds pass to and fro; the network of

fire and air irrigates the veins. Infancy and childhood is the

chaos or first turbid flux of sense prior to the establishment of

order; the intervals of time which may be observed in some

intermittent fevers correspond to the density of the elements.

The spinal marrow, including the brain, is formed out of the

finest sorts of triangles, and is the connecting link between

body and mind. Health is only to be preserved by imitating the

motions of the world in space, which is the mother and nurse of

generation. The work of digestion is carried on by the superior

sharpness of the triangles forming the substances of the human

body to those which are introduced into it in the shape of food.

The freshest and acutest forms of triangles are those that are

found in children, but they become more obtuse with advancing

years; and when they finally wear out and fall to pieces, old age

and death supervene.

As in the Republic, Plato is still the enemy of the purgative

treatment of physicians, which, except in extreme cases, no man

of sense will ever adopt. For, as he adds, with an insight into

the truth, ‘every disease is akin to the nature of the living

being and is only irritated by stimulants.’ He is of opinion that

nature should be left to herself, and is inclined to think that

physicians are in vain (Laws—where he says that warm baths would

be more beneficial to the limbs of the aged rustic than the

prescriptions of a not over-wise doctor). If he seems to be

extreme in his condemnation of medicine and to rely too much on

diet and exercise, he might appeal to nearly all the best

physicians of our own age in support of his opinions, who often

speak to their patients of the worthlessness of drugs. For we

ourselves are sceptical about medicine, and very unwilling to

submit to the purgative treatment of physicians. May we not claim

for Plato an anticipation of modern ideas as about some questions

of astronomy and physics, so also about medicine? As in the

Charmides he tells us that the body cannot be cured without the

soul, so in the Timaeus he strongly asserts the sympathy of soul

and body; any defect of either is the occasion of the greatest

discord and disproportion in the other. Here too may be a

presentiment that in the medicine of the future the

interdependence of mind and body will be more fully recognized,

and that the influence of the one over the other may be exerted

in a manner which is not now thought possible.

In Plato’s explanation of sensation we are struck by the fact

that he has not the same distinct conception of organs of sense

which is familiar to ourselves. The senses are not instruments,

but rather passages, through which external objects strike upon

the mind. The eye is the aperture through which the stream of

vision passes, the ear is the aperture through which the

vibrations of sound pass. But that the complex structure of the

eye or the ear is in any sense the cause of sight and hearing he

seems hardly to be aware.

The process of sight is the most complicated (Rep.), and consists

of three elements—the light which is supposed to reside within

the eye, the light of the sun, and the light emitted from

external objects. When the light of the eye meets the light of

the sun, and both together meet the light issuing from an

external object, this is the simple act of sight. When the

particles of light which proceed from the object are exactly

equal to the particles of the visual ray which meet them from

within, then the body is transparent. If they are larger and

contract the visual ray, a black colour is produced; if they are

smaller and dilate it, a white. Other phenomena are produced by

the variety and motion of light. A sudden flash of fire at once

elicits light and moisture from the eye, and causes a bright

colour. A more subdued light, on mingling with the moisture of

the eye, produces a red colour. Out of these elements all other

colours are derived. All of them are combinations of bright and

red with white and black. Plato himself tells us that he does not

know in what proportions they combine, and he is of opinion that

such knowledge is granted to the gods only. To have seen the

affinity of them to each other and their connection with light,

is not a bad basis for a theory of colours. We must remember that

they were not distinctly defined to his, as they are to our eyes;

he saw them, not as they are divided in the prism, or

artificially manufactured for the painter’s use, but as they

exist in nature, blended and confused with one another.

We can hardly agree with him when he tells us that smells do not

admit of kinds. He seems to think that no definite qualities can

attach to bodies which are in a state of transition or

evaporation; he also makes the subtle observation that smells

must be denser than air, though thinner than water, because when

there is an obstruction to the breathing, air can penetrate, but

not smell.

The affections peculiar to the tongue are of various kinds, and,

like many other affections, are caused by contraction and

dilation. Some of them are produced by rough, others by

abstergent, others by inflammatory substances,—these act upon the

testing instruments of the tongue, and produce a more or less

disagreeable sensation, while other particles congenial to the

tongue soften and harmonize them. The instruments of taste reach

from the tongue to the heart. Plato has a lively sense of the

manner in which sensation and motion are communicated from one

part of the body to the other, though he confuses the affections

with the organs. Hearing is a blow which passes through the ear

and ends in the region of the liver, being transmitted by means

of the air, the brain, and the blood to the soul. The swifter

sound is acute, the sound which moves slowly is grave. A great

body of sound is loud, the opposite is low. Discord is produced

by the swifter and slower motions of two sounds, and is converted

into harmony when the swifter motions begin to pause and are

overtaken by the slower.

The general phenomena of sensation are partly internal, but the

more violent are caused by conflict with external objects.

Proceeding by a method of superficial observation, Plato remarks

that the more sensitive parts of the human frame are those which

are least covered by flesh, as is the case with the head and the

elbows. Man, if his head had been covered with a thicker pulp of

flesh, might have been a longer-lived animal than he is, but

could not have had as quick perceptions. On the other hand, the

tongue is one of the most sensitive of organs; but then this is

made, not to be a covering to the bones which contain the marrow

or source of life, but with an express purpose, and in a separate

mass.

We have now to consider how far in any of these speculations

Plato approximated to the discoveries of modern science. The

modern physical philosopher is apt to dwell exclusively on the

absurdities of ancient ideas about science, on the haphazard

fancies and a priori assumptions of ancient teachers, on their

confusion of facts and ideas, on their inconsistency and

blindness to the most obvious phenomena. He measures them not by

what preceded them, but by what has followed them. He does not

consider that ancient physical philosophy was not a free enquiry,

but a growth, in which the mind was passive rather than active,

and was incapable of resisting the impressions which flowed in

upon it. He hardly allows to the notions of the ancients the

merit of being the stepping-stones by which he has himself risen

to a higher knowledge. He never reflects, how great a thing it

was to have formed a conception, however imperfect, either of the

human frame as a whole, or of the world as a whole. According to

the view taken in these volumes the errors of ancient physicists

were not separable from the intellectual conditions under which

they lived. Their genius was their own; and they were not the

rash and hasty generalizers which, since the days of Bacon, we

have been apt to suppose them. The thoughts of men widened to

receive experience; at first they seemed to know all things as in

a dream: after a while they look at them closely and hold them in

their hands. They begin to arrange them in classes and to connect

causes with effects. General notions are necessary to the

apprehension of particular facts, the metaphysical to the

physical. Before men can observe the world, they must be able to

conceive it.

To do justice to the subject, we should consider the physical

philosophy of the ancients as a whole; we should remember, (1)

that the nebular theory was the received belief of several of the

early physicists; (2) that the development of animals out of

fishes who came to land, and of man out of the animals, was held

by Anaximander in the sixth century before Christ (Plut. Symp.

Quaest; Plac. Phil.); (3) that even by Philolaus and the early

Pythagoreans, the earth was held to be a body like the other

stars revolving in space around the sun or a central fire; (4)

that the beginnings of chemistry are discernible in the ‘similar

particles’ of Anaxagoras. Also they knew or thought (5) that

there was a sex in plants as well as in animals; (6) they were

aware that musical notes depended on the relative length or

tension of the strings from which they were emitted, and were

measured by ratios of number; (7) that mathematical laws pervaded

the world; and even qualitative differences were supposed to have

their origin in number and figure; (8) the annihilation of matter

was denied by several of them, and the seeming disappearance of

it held to be a transformation only. For, although one of these

discoveries might have been supposed to be a happy guess, taken

together they seem to imply a great advance and almost maturity

of natural knowledge.

We should also remember, when we attribute to the ancients hasty

generalizations and delusions of language, that physical

philosophy and metaphysical too have been guilty of similar

fallacies in quite recent times. We by no means distinguish

clearly between mind and body, between ideas and facts. Have not

many discussions arisen about the Atomic theory in which a point

has been confused with a material atom? Have not the natures of

things been explained by imaginary entities, such as life or

phlogiston, which exist in the mind only? Has not disease been

regarded, like sin, sometimes as a negative and necessary,

sometimes as a positive or malignant principle? The ‘idols’ of

Bacon are nearly as common now as ever; they are inherent in the

human mind, and when they have the most complete dominion over

us, we are least able to perceive them. We recognize them in the

ancients, but we fail to see them in ourselves.

Such reflections, although this is not the place in which to

dwell upon them at length, lead us to take a favourable view of

the speculations of the Timaeus. We should consider not how much

Plato actually knew, but how far he has contributed to the

general ideas of physics, or supplied the notions which, whether

true or false, have stimulated the minds of later generations in

the path of discovery. Some of them may seem old-fashioned, but

may nevertheless have had a great influence in promoting system

and assisting enquiry, while in others we hear the latest word of

physical or metaphysical philosophy. There is also an

intermediate class, in which Plato falls short of the truths of

modern science, though he is not wholly unacquainted with them.

(1) To the first class belongs the teleological theory of

creation. Whether all things in the world can be explained as the

result of natural laws, or whether we must not admit of

tendencies and marks of design also, has been a question much

disputed of late years. Even if all phenomena are the result of

natural forces, we must admit that there are many things in

heaven and earth which are as well expressed under the image of

mind or design as under any other. At any rate, the language of

Plato has been the language of natural theology down to our own

time, nor can any description of the world wholly dispense with

it. The notion of first and second or co-operative causes, which

originally appears in the Timaeus, has likewise survived to our

own day, and has been a great peace-maker between theology and

science. Plato also approaches very near to our doctrine of the

primary and secondary qualities of matter. (2) Another popular

notion which is found in the Timaeus, is the feebleness of the

human intellect—‘God knows the original qualities of things; man

can only hope to attain to probability.’ We speak in almost the

same words of human intelligence, but not in the same manner of

the uncertainty of our knowledge of nature. The reason is that

the latter is assured to us by experiment, and is not contrasted

with the certainty of ideal or mathematical knowledge. But the

ancient philosopher never experimented: in the Timaeus Plato

seems to have thought that there would be impiety in making the

attempt; he, for example, who tried experiments in colours would

‘forget the difference of the human and divine natures.’ Their

indefiniteness is probably the reason why he singles them out, as

especially incapable of being tested by experiment. (Compare the

saying of Anaxagoras—Sext. Pyrrh.—that since snow is made of

water and water is black, snow ought to be black.)

The greatest ‘divination’ of the ancients was the supremacy which

they assigned to mathematics in all the realms of nature; for in

all of them there is a foundation of mechanics. Even physiology

partakes of figure and number; and Plato is not wrong in

attributing them to the human frame, but in the omission to

observe how little could be explained by them. Thus we may remark

in passing that the most fanciful of ancient philosophies is also

the most nearly verified in fact. The fortunate guess that the

world is a sum of numbers and figures has been the most fruitful

of anticipations. The ‘diatonic’ scale of the Pythagoreans and

Plato suggested to Kepler that the secret of the distances of the

planets from one another was to be found in mathematical

proportions. The doctrine that the heavenly bodies all move in a

circle is known by us to be erroneous; but without such an error

how could the human mind have comprehended the heavens?

Astronomy, even in modern times, has made far greater progress by

the high a priori road than could have been attained by any

other. Yet, strictly speaking—and the remark applies to ancient

physics generally—this high a priori road was based upon a

posteriori grounds. For there were no facts of which the ancients

were so well assured by experience as facts of number. Having

observed that they held good in a few instances, they applied

them everywhere; and in the complexity, of which they were

capable, found the explanation of the equally complex phenomena

of the universe. They seemed to see them in the least things as

well as in the greatest; in atoms, as well as in suns and stars;

in the human body as well as in external nature. And now a

favourite speculation of modern chemistry is the explanation of

qualitative difference by quantitative, which is at present

verified to a certain extent and may hereafter be of far more

universal application. What is this but the atoms of Democritus

and the triangles of Plato? The ancients should not be wholly

deprived of the credit of their guesses because they were unable

to prove them. May they not have had, like the animals, an

instinct of something more than they knew?

Besides general notions we seem to find in the Timaeus some more

precise approximations to the discoveries of modern physical

science. First, the doctrine of equipoise. Plato affirms, almost

in so many words, that nature abhors a vacuum. Whenever a

particle is displaced, the rest push and thrust one another until

equality is restored. We must remember that these ideas were not

derived from any definite experiment, but were the original

reflections of man, fresh from the first observation of nature.

The latest word of modern philosophy is continuity and

development, but to Plato this is the beginning and foundation of

science; there is nothing that he is so strongly persuaded of as

that the world is one, and that all the various existences which

are contained in it are only the transformations of the same soul

of the world acting on the same matter. He would have readily

admitted that out of the protoplasm all things were formed by the

gradual process of creation; but he would have insisted that mind

and intelligence—not meaning by this, however, a conscious mind

or person—were prior to them, and could alone have created them.

Into the workings of this eternal mind or intelligence he does

not enter further; nor would there have been any use in

attempting to investigate the things which no eye has seen nor

any human language can express.

Lastly, there remain two points in which he seems to touch great

discoveries of modern times—the law of gravitation, and the

circulation of the blood.

(1) The law of gravitation, according to Plato, is a law, not

only of the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, but of

similar bodies to similar, having a magnetic power as well as a

principle of gravitation. He observed that earth, water, and air

had settled down to their places, and he imagined fire or the

exterior aether to have a place beyond air. When air seemed to go

upwards and fire to pierce through air—when water and earth fell

downward, they were seeking their native elements. He did not

remark that his own explanation did not suit all phenomena; and

the simpler explanation, which assigns to bodies degrees of

heaviness and lightness proportioned to the mass and distance of

the bodies which attract them, never occurred to him. Yet the

affinities of similar substances have some effect upon the

composition of the world, and of this Plato may be thought to

have had an anticipation. He may be described as confusing the

attraction of gravitation with the attraction of cohesion. The

influence of such affinities and the chemical action of one body

upon another in long periods of time have become a recognized

principle of geology.

(2) Plato is perfectly aware—and he could hardly be ignorant—that

blood is a fluid in constant motion. He also knew that blood is

partly a solid substance consisting of several elements, which,

as he might have observed in the use of ‘cupping-glasses’,

decompose and die, when no longer in motion. But the specific

discovery that the blood flows out on one side of the heart

through the arteries and returns through the veins on the other,

which is commonly called the circulation of the blood, was

absolutely unknown to him.

A further study of the Timaeus suggests some after-thoughts which

may be conveniently brought together in this place. The topics

which I propose briefly to reconsider are (a) the relation of the

Timaeus to the other dialogues of Plato and to the previous

philosophy; (b) the nature of God and of creation (c) the

morality of the Timaeus:—

(a) The Timaeus is more imaginative and less scientific than any

other of the Platonic dialogues. It is conjectural astronomy,

conjectural natural philosophy, conjectural medicine. The writer

himself is constantly repeating that he is speaking what is

probable only. The dialogue is put into the mouth of Timaeus, a

Pythagorean philosopher, and therefore here, as in the

Parmenides, we are in doubt how far Plato is expressing his own

sentiments. Hence the connexion with the other dialogues is

comparatively slight. We may fill up the lacunae of the Timaeus

by the help of the Republic or Phaedrus: we may identify the same

and other with the (Greek) of the Philebus. We may find in the

Laws or in the Statesman parallels with the account of creation

and of the first origin of man. It would be possible to frame a

scheme in which all these various elements might have a place.

But such a mode of proceeding would be unsatisfactory, because we

have no reason to suppose that Plato intended his scattered

thoughts to be collected in a system. There is a common spirit in

his writings, and there are certain general principles, such as

the opposition of the sensible and intellectual, and the priority

of mind, which run through all of them; but he has no definite

forms of words in which he consistently expresses himself. While

the determinations of human thought are in process of creation he

is necessarily tentative and uncertain. And there is least of

definiteness, whenever either in describing the beginning or the

end of the world, he has recourse to myths. These are not the

fixed modes in which spiritual truths are revealed to him, but

the efforts of imagination, by which at different times and in

various manners he seeks to embody his conceptions. The clouds of

mythology are still resting upon him, and he has not yet pierced

‘to the heaven of the fixed stars’ which is beyond them. It is

safer then to admit the inconsistencies of the Timaeus, or to

endeavour to fill up what is wanting from our own imagination,

inspired by a study of the dialogue, than to refer to other

Platonic writings,—and still less should we refer to the

successors of Plato,—for the elucidation of it.

More light is thrown upon the Timaeus by a comparison of the

previous philosophies. For the physical science of the ancients

was traditional, descending through many generations of Ionian

and Pythagorean philosophers. Plato does not look out upon the

heavens and describe what he sees in them, but he builds upon the

foundations of others, adding something out of the ‘depths of his

own self-consciousness.’ Socrates had already spoken of God the

creator, who made all things for the best. While he ridiculed the

superficial explanations of phenomena which were current in his

age, he recognised the marks both of benevolence and of design in

the frame of man and in the world. The apparatus of winds and

waters is contemptuously rejected by him in the Phaedo, but he

thinks that there is a power greater than that of any Atlas in

the ‘Best’ (Phaedo; Arist. Met.). Plato, following his master,

affirms this principle of the best, but he acknowledges that the

best is limited by the conditions of matter. In the generation

before Socrates, Anaxagoras had brought together ‘Chaos’ and

‘Mind’; and these are connected by Plato in the Timaeus, but in

accordance with his own mode of thinking he has interposed

between them the idea or pattern according to which mind worked.

The circular impulse (Greek) of the one philosopher answers to

the circular movement (Greek) of the other. But unlike

Anaxagoras, Plato made the sun and stars living beings and not

masses of earth or metal. The Pythagoreans again had framed a

world out of numbers, which they constructed into figures. Plato

adopted their speculations and improved upon them by a more exact

knowledge of geometry. The Atomists too made the world, if not

out of geometrical figures, at least out of different forms of

atoms, and these atoms resembled the triangles of Plato in being

too small to be visible. But though the physiology of the Timaeus

is partly borrowed from them, they are either ignored by Plato or

referred to with a secret contempt and dislike. He looks with

more favour on the Pythagoreans, whose intervals of number

applied to the distances of the planets reappear in the Timaeus.

It is probable that among the Pythagoreans living in the fourth

century B.C., there were already some who, like Plato, made the

earth their centre. Whether he obtained his circles of the Same

and Other from any previous thinker is uncertain. The four

elements are taken from Empedocles; the interstices of the

Timaeus may also be compared with his (Greek). The passage of one

element into another is common to Heracleitus and several of the

Ionian philosophers. So much of a syncretist is Plato, though not

after the manner of the Neoplatonists. For the elements which he

borrows from others are fused and transformed by his own genius.

On the other hand we find fewer traces in Plato of early Ionic or

Eleatic speculation. He does not imagine the world of sense to be

made up of opposites or to be in a perpetual flux, but to vary

within certain limits which are controlled by what he calls the

principle of the same. Unlike the Eleatics, who relegated the

world to the sphere of not-being, he admits creation to have an

existence which is real and even eternal, although dependent on

the will of the creator. Instead of maintaining the doctrine that

the void has a necessary place in the existence of the world, he

rather affirms the modern thesis that nature abhors a vacuum, as

in the Sophist he also denies the reality of not-being (Aristot.

Metaph.). But though in these respects he differs from them, he

is deeply penetrated by the spirit of their philosophy; he

differs from them with reluctance, and gladly recognizes the

‘generous depth’ of Parmenides (Theaet.).

There is a similarity between the Timaeus and the fragments of

Philolaus, which by some has been thought to be so great as to

create a suspicion that they are derived from it. Philolaus is

known to us from the Phaedo of Plato as a Pythagorean philosopher

residing at Thebes in the latter half of the fifth century B.C.,

after the dispersion of the original Pythagorean society. He was

the teacher of Simmias and Cebes, who became disciples of

Socrates. We have hardly any other information about him. The

story that Plato had purchased three books of his writings from a

relation is not worth repeating; it is only a fanciful way in

which an ancient biographer dresses up the fact that there was

supposed to be a resemblance between the two writers. Similar

gossiping stories are told about the sources of the Republic and

the Phaedo. That there really existed in antiquity a work passing

under the name of Philolaus there can be no doubt. Fragments of

this work are preserved to us, chiefly in Stobaeus, a few in

Boethius and other writers. They remind us of the Timaeus, as

well as of the Phaedrus and Philebus. When the writer says (Stob.

Eclog.) that all things are either finite (definite) or infinite

(indefinite), or a union of the two, and that this antithesis and

synthesis pervades all art and nature, we are reminded of the

Philebus. When he calls the centre of the world (Greek), we have

a parallel to the Phaedrus. His distinction between the world of

order, to which the sun and moon and the stars belong, and the

world of disorder, which lies in the region between the moon and

the earth, approximates to Plato’s sphere of the Same and of the

Other. Like Plato (Tim.), he denied the above and below in space,

and said that all things were the same in relation to a centre.

He speaks also of the world as one and indestructible: ‘for

neither from within nor from without does it admit of

destruction’ (Tim). He mentions ten heavenly bodies, including

the sun and moon, the earth and the counter-earth (Greek), and in

the midst of them all he places the central fire, around which

they are moving—this is hidden from the earth by the

counter-earth. Of neither is there any trace in Plato, who makes

the earth the centre of his system. Philolaus magnifies the

virtues of particular numbers, especially of the number 10 (Stob.

Eclog.), and descants upon odd and even numbers, after the manner

of the later Pythagoreans. It is worthy of remark that these

mystical fancies are nowhere to be found in the writings of

Plato, although the importance of number as a form and also an

instrument of thought is ever present to his mind. Both Philolaus

and Plato agree in making the world move in certain numerical

ratios according to a musical scale: though Bockh is of opinion

that the two scales, of Philolaus and of the Timaeus, do not

correspond...We appear not to be sufficiently acquainted with the

early Pythagoreans to know how far the statements contained in

these fragments corresponded with their doctrines; and we

therefore cannot pronounce, either in favour of the genuineness

of the fragments, with Bockh and Zeller, or, with Valentine Rose

and Schaarschmidt, against them. But it is clear that they throw

but little light upon the Timaeus, and that their resemblance to

it has been exaggerated.

That there is a degree of confusion and indistinctness in Plato’s

account both of man and of the universe has been already

acknowledged. We cannot tell (nor could Plato himself have told)

where the figure or myth ends and the philosophical truth begins;

we cannot explain (nor could Plato himself have explained to us)

the relation of the ideas to appearance, of which one is the copy

of the other, and yet of all things in the world they are the

most opposed and unlike. This opposition is presented to us in

many forms, as the antithesis of the one and many, of the finite

and infinite, of the intelligible and sensible, of the

unchangeable and the changing, of the indivisible and the

divisible, of the fixed stars and the planets, of the creative

mind and the primeval chaos. These pairs of opposites are so many

aspects of the great opposition between ideas and phenomena—they

easily pass into one another; and sometimes the two members of

the relation differ in kind, sometimes only in degree. As in

Aristotle’s matter and form the connexion between them is really

inseparable; for if we attempt to separate them they become

devoid of content and therefore indistinguishable; there is no

difference between the idea of which nothing can be predicated,

and the chaos or matter which has no perceptible

qualities—between Being in the abstract and Nothing. Yet we are

frequently told that the one class of them is the reality and the

other appearance; and one is often spoken of as the double or

reflection of the other. For Plato never clearly saw that both

elements had an equal place in mind and in nature; and hence,

especially when we argue from isolated passages in his writings,

or attempt to draw what appear to us to be the natural inferences

from them, we are full of perplexity. There is a similar

confusion about necessity and free-will, and about the state of

the soul after death. Also he sometimes supposes that God is

immanent in the world, sometimes that he is transcendent. And

having no distinction of objective and subjective, he passes

imperceptibly from one to the other; from intelligence to soul,

from eternity to time. These contradictions may be softened or

concealed by a judicious use of language, but they cannot be

wholly got rid of. That an age of intellectual transition must

also be one of inconsistency; that the creative is opposed to the

critical or defining habit of mind or time, has been often

repeated by us. But, as Plato would say, ‘there is no harm in

repeating twice or thrice’ (Laws) what is important for the

understanding of a great author.

It has not, however, been observed, that the confusion partly

arises out of the elements of opposing philosophies which are

preserved in him. He holds these in solution, he brings them into

relation with one another, but he does not perfectly harmonize

them. They are part of his own mind, and he is incapable of

placing himself outside of them and criticizing them. They grow

as he grows; they are a kind of composition with which his own

philosophy is overlaid. In early life he fancies that he has

mastered them: but he is also mastered by them; and in language

(Sophist) which may be compared with the hesitating tone of the

Timaeus, he confesses in his later years that they are full of

obscurity to him. He attributes new meanings to the words of

Parmenides and Heracleitus; but at times the old Eleatic

philosophy appears to go beyond him; then the world of phenomena

disappears, but the doctrine of ideas is also reduced to

nothingness. All of them are nearer to one another than they

themselves supposed, and nearer to him than he supposed. All of

them are antagonistic to sense and have an affinity to number and

measure and a presentiment of ideas. Even in Plato they still

retain their contentious or controversial character, which was

developed by the growth of dialectic. He is never able to

reconcile the first causes of the pre-Socratic philosophers with

the final causes of Socrates himself. There is no intelligible

account of the relation of numbers to the universal ideas, or of

universals to the idea of good. He found them all three, in the

Pythagorean philosophy and in the teaching of Socrates and of the

Megarians respectively; and, because they all furnished modes of

explaining and arranging phenomena, he is unwilling to give up

any of them, though he is unable to unite them in a consistent

whole.

Lastly, Plato, though an idealist philosopher, is Greek and not

Oriental in spirit and feeling. He is no mystic or ascetic; he is

not seeking in vain to get rid of matter or to find absorption in

the divine nature, or in the Soul of the universe. And therefore

we are not surprised to find that his philosophy in the Timaeus

returns at last to a worship of the heavens, and that to him, as

to other Greeks, nature, though containing a remnant of evil, is

still glorious and divine. He takes away or drops the veil of

mythology, and presents her to us in what appears to him to be

the form-fairer and truer far—of mathematical figures. It is this

element in the Timaeus, no less than its affinity to certain

Pythagorean speculations, which gives it a character not wholly

in accordance with the other dialogues of Plato.

(b) The Timaeus contains an assertion perhaps more distinct than

is found in any of the other dialogues (Rep.; Laws) of the

goodness of God. ‘He was good himself, and he fashioned the good

everywhere.’ He was not ‘a jealous God,’ and therefore he desired

that all other things should be equally good. He is the IDEA of

good who has now become a person, and speaks and is spoken of as

God. Yet his personality seems to appear only in the act of

creation. In so far as he works with his eye fixed upon an

eternal pattern he is like the human artificer in the Republic.

Here the theory of Platonic ideas intrudes upon us. God, like

man, is supposed to have an ideal of which Plato is unable to

tell us the origin. He may be said, in the language of modern

philosophy, to resolve the divine mind into subject and object.

The first work of creation is perfected, the second begins under

the direction of inferior ministers. The supreme God is withdrawn

from the world and returns to his own accustomed nature (Tim.).

As in the Statesman, he retires to his place of view. So early

did the Epicurean doctrine take possession of the Greek mind, and

so natural is it to the heart of man, when he has once passed out

of the stage of mythology into that of rational religion. For he

sees the marks of design in the world; but he no longer sees or

fancies that he sees God walking in the garden or haunting stream

or mountain. He feels also that he must put God as far as

possible out of the way of evil, and therefore he banishes him

from an evil world. Plato is sensible of the difficulty; and he

often shows that he is desirous of justifying the ways of God to

man. Yet on the other hand, in the Tenth Book of the Laws he

passes a censure on those who say that the Gods have no care of

human things.

The creation of the world is the impression of order on a

previously existing chaos. The formula of Anaxagoras—‘all things

were in chaos or confusion, and then mind came and disposed

them’—is a summary of the first part of the Timaeus. It is true

that of a chaos without differences no idea could be formed. All

was not mixed but one; and therefore it was not difficult for the

later Platonists to draw inferences by which they were enabled to

reconcile the narrative of the Timaeus with the Mosaic account of

the creation. Neither when we speak of mind or intelligence, do

we seem to get much further in our conception than circular

motion, which was deemed to be the most perfect. Plato, like

Anaxagoras, while commencing his theory of the universe with

ideas of mind and of the best, is compelled in the execution of

his design to condescend to the crudest physics.

(c) The morality of the Timaeus is singular, and it is difficult

to adjust the balance between the two elements of it. The

difficulty which Plato feels, is that which all of us feel, and

which is increased in our own day by the progress of physical

science, how the responsibility of man is to be reconciled with

his dependence on natural causes. And sometimes, like other men,

he is more impressed by one aspect of human life, sometimes by

the other. In the Republic he represents man as freely choosing

his own lot in a state prior to birth—a conception which, if

taken literally, would still leave him subject to the dominion of

necessity in his after life; in the Statesman he supposes the

human race to be preserved in the world only by a divine

interposition; while in the Timaeus the supreme God commissions

the inferior deities to avert from him all but self-inflicted

evils—words which imply that all the evils of men are really

self-inflicted. And here, like Plato (the insertion of a note in

the text of an ancient writer is a literary curiosity worthy of

remark), we may take occasion to correct an error. For we too

hastily said that Plato in the Timaeus regarded all ‘vices and

crimes as involuntary.’ But the fact is that he is inconsistent

with himself; in one and the same passage vice is attributed to

the relaxation of the bodily frame, and yet we are exhorted to

avoid it and pursue virtue. It is also admitted that good and

evil conduct are to be attributed respectively to good and evil

laws and institutions. These cannot be given by individuals to

themselves; and therefore human actions, in so far as they are

dependent upon them, are regarded by Plato as involuntary rather

than voluntary. Like other writers on this subject, he is unable

to escape from some degree of self-contradiction. He had learned

from Socrates that vice is ignorance, and suddenly the doctrine

seems to him to be confirmed by observing how much of the good

and bad in human character depends on the bodily constitution. So

in modern times the speculative doctrine of necessity has often

been supported by physical facts.

The Timaeus also contains an anticipation of the stoical life

according to nature. Man contemplating the heavens is to regulate

his erring life according to them. He is to partake of the repose

of nature and of the order of nature, to bring the variable

principle in himself into harmony with the principle of the same.

The ethics of the Timaeus may be summed up in the single idea of

‘law.’ To feel habitually that he is part of the order of the

universe, is one of the highest ethical motives of which man is

capable. Something like this is what Plato means when he speaks

of the soul ‘moving about the same in unchanging thought of the

same.’ He does not explain how man is acted upon by the lesser

influences of custom or of opinion; or how the commands of the

soul watching in the citadel are conveyed to the bodily organs.

But this perhaps, to use once more expressions of his own, ‘is

part of another subject’ or ‘may be more suitably discussed on

some other occasion.’

There is no difficulty, by the help of Aristotle and later

writers, in criticizing the Timaeus of Plato, in pointing out the

inconsistencies of the work, in dwelling on the ignorance of

anatomy displayed by the author, in showing the fancifulness or

unmeaningness of some of his reasons. But the Timaeus still

remains the greatest effort of the human mind to conceive the

world as a whole which the genius of antiquity has bequeathed to

us.

One more aspect of the Timaeus remains to be considered—the

mythological or geographical. Is it not a wonderful thing that a

few pages of one of Plato’s dialogues have grown into a great

legend, not confined to Greece only, but spreading far and wide

over the nations of Europe and reaching even to Egypt and Asia?

Like the tale of Troy, or the legend of the Ten Tribes (Ewald,

Hist. of Isr.), which perhaps originated in a few verses of II

Esdras, it has become famous, because it has coincided with a

great historical fact. Like the romance of King Arthur, which has

had so great a charm, it has found a way over the seas from one

country and language to another. It inspired the navigators of

the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; it foreshadowed the

discovery of America. It realized the fiction so natural to the

human mind, because it answered the enquiry about the origin of

the arts, that there had somewhere existed an ancient primitive

civilization. It might find a place wherever men chose to look

for it; in North, South, East, or West; in the Islands of the

Blest; before the entrance of the Straits of Gibraltar, in Sweden

or in Palestine. It mattered little whether the description in

Plato agreed with the locality assigned to it or not. It was a

legend so adapted to the human mind that it made a habitation for

itself in any country. It was an island in the clouds, which

might be seen anywhere by the eye of faith. It was a subject

especially congenial to the ponderous industry of certain French

and Swedish writers, who delighted in heaping up learning of all

sorts but were incapable of using it.

M. Martin has written a valuable dissertation on the opinions

entertained respecting the Island of Atlantis in ancient and

modern times. It is a curious chapter in the history of the human

mind. The tale of Atlantis is the fabric of a vision, but it has

never ceased to interest mankind. It was variously regarded by

the ancients themselves. The stronger heads among them, like

Strabo and Longinus, were as little disposed to believe in the

truth of it as the modern reader in Gulliver or Robinson Crusoe.

On the other hand there is no kind or degree of absurdity or

fancy in which the more foolish writers, both of antiquity and of

modern times, have not indulged respecting it. The

Neo-Platonists, loyal to their master, like some commentators on

the Christian Scriptures, sought to give an allegorical meaning

to what they also believed to be an historical fact. It was as if

some one in our own day were to convert the poems of Homer into

an allegory of the Christian religion, at the same time

maintaining them to be an exact and veritable history. In the

Middle Ages the legend seems to have been half-forgotten until

revived by the discovery of America. It helped to form the Utopia

of Sir Thomas More and the New Atlantis of Bacon, although

probably neither of those great men were at all imposed upon by

the fiction. It was most prolific in the seventeenth or in the

early part of the eighteenth century, when the human mind,

seeking for Utopias or inventing them, was glad to escape out of

the dulness of the present into the romance of the past or some

ideal of the future. The later forms of such narratives contained

features taken from the Edda, as well as from the Old and New

Testament; also from the tales of missionaries and the

experiences of travellers and of colonists.

The various opinions respecting the Island of Atlantis have no

interest for us except in so far as they illustrate the

extravagances of which men are capable. But this is a real

interest and a serious lesson, if we remember that now as

formerly the human mind is liable to be imposed upon by the

illusions of the past, which are ever assuming some new form.

When we have shaken off the rubbish of ages, there remain one or

two questions of which the investigation has a permanent value:—

1. Did Plato derive the legend of Atlantis from an Egyptian

source? It may be replied that there is no such legend in any

writer previous to Plato; neither in Homer, nor in Pindar, nor in

Herodotus is there any mention of an Island of Atlantis, nor any

reference to it in Aristotle, nor any citation of an earlier

writer by a later one in which it is to be found. Nor have any

traces been discovered hitherto in Egyptian monuments of a

connexion between Greece and Egypt older than the eighth or ninth

century B.C. It is true that Proclus, writing in the fifth

century after Christ, tells us of stones and columns in Egypt on

which the history of the Island of Atlantis was engraved. The

statement may be false—there are similar tales about columns set

up ‘by the Canaanites whom Joshua drove out’ (Procop.); but even

if true, it would only show that the legend, 800 years after the

time of Plato, had been transferred to Egypt, and inscribed, not,

like other forgeries, in books, but on stone. Probably in the

Alexandrian age, when Egypt had ceased to have a history and

began to appropriate the legends of other nations, many such

monuments were to be found of events which had become famous in

that or other countries. The oldest witness to the story is said

to be Crantor, a Stoic philosopher who lived a generation later

than Plato, and therefore may have borrowed it from him. The

statement is found in Proclus; but we require better assurance

than Proclus can give us before we accept this or any other

statement which he makes.

Secondly, passing from the external to the internal evidence, we

may remark that the story is far more likely to have been

invented by Plato than to have been brought by Solon from Egypt.

That is another part of his legend which Plato also seeks to

impose upon us. The verisimilitude which he has given to the tale

is a further reason for suspecting it; for he could easily

‘invent Egyptian or any other tales’ (Phaedrus). Are not the

words, ‘The truth of the story is a great advantage,’ if we read

between the lines, an indication of the fiction? It is only a

legend that Solon went to Egypt, and if he did he could not have

conversed with Egyptian priests or have read records in their

temples. The truth is that the introduction is a mosaic work of

small touches which, partly by their minuteness, and also by

their seeming probability, win the confidence of the reader. Who

would desire better evidence than that of Critias, who had heard

the narrative in youth when the memory is strongest at the age of

ten from his grandfather Critias, an old man of ninety, who in

turn had heard it from Solon himself? Is not the famous

expression—‘You Hellenes are ever children and there is no

knowledge among you hoary with age,’ really a compliment to the

Athenians who are described in these words as ‘ever young’? And

is the thought expressed in them to be attributed to the learning

of the Egyptian priest, and not rather to the genius of Plato? Or

when the Egyptian says—‘Hereafter at our leisure we will take up

the written documents and examine in detail the exact truth about

these things’—what is this but a literary trick by which Plato

sets off his narrative? Could any war between Athens and the

Island of Atlantis have really coincided with the struggle

between the Greeks and Persians, as is sufficiently hinted though

not expressly stated in the narrative of Plato? And whence came

the tradition to Egypt? or in what does the story consist except

in the war between the two rival powers and the submersion of

both of them? And how was the tale transferred to the poem of

Solon? ‘It is not improbable,’ says Mr. Grote, ‘that Solon did

leave an unfinished Egyptian poem’ (Plato). But are probabilities

for which there is not a tittle of evidence, and which are

without any parallel, to be deemed worthy of attention by the

critic? How came the poem of Solon to disappear in antiquity? or

why did Plato, if the whole narrative was known to him, break off

almost at the beginning of it?

While therefore admiring the diligence and erudition of M.

Martin, we cannot for a moment suppose that the tale was told to

Solon by an Egyptian priest, nor can we believe that Solon wrote

a poem upon the theme which was thus suggested to him—a poem

which disappeared in antiquity; or that the Island of Atlantis or

the antediluvian Athens ever had any existence except in the

imagination of Plato. Martin is of opinion that Plato would have

been terrified if he could have foreseen the endless fancies to

which his Island of Atlantis has given occasion. Rather he would

have been infinitely amused if he could have known that his gift

of invention would have deceived M. Martin himself into the

belief that the tradition was brought from Egypt by Solon and

made the subject of a poem by him. M. Martin may also be gently

censured for citing without sufficient discrimination ancient

authors having very different degrees of authority and value.

2. It is an interesting and not unimportant question which is

touched upon by Martin, whether the Atlantis of Plato in any

degree held out a guiding light to the early navigators. He is

inclined to think that there is no real connexion between them.

But surely the discovery of the New World was preceded by a

prophetic anticipation of it, which, like the hope of a Messiah,

was entering into the hearts of men? And this hope was nursed by

ancient tradition, which had found expression from time to time

in the celebrated lines of Seneca and in many other places. This

tradition was sustained by the great authority of Plato, and

therefore the legend of the Island of Atlantis, though not

closely connected with the voyages of the early navigators, may

be truly said to have contributed indirectly to the great

discovery.

The Timaeus of Plato, like the Protagoras and several portions of

the Phaedrus and Republic, was translated by Cicero into Latin.

About a fourth, comprehending with lacunae the first portion of

the dialogue, is preserved in several MSS. These generally agree,

and therefore may be supposed to be derived from a single

original. The version is very faithful, and is a remarkable

monument of Cicero’s skill in managing the difficult and

intractable Greek. In his treatise De Natura Deorum, he also

refers to the Timaeus, which, speaking in the person of Velleius

the Epicurean, he severely criticises.

The commentary of Proclus on the Timaeus is a wonderful monument

of the silliness and prolixity of the Alexandrian Age. It extends

to about thirty pages of the book, and is thirty times the length

of the original. It is surprising that this voluminous work

should have found a translator (Thomas Taylor, a kindred spirit,

who was himself a Neo-Platonist, after the fashion, not of the

fifth or sixteenth, but of the nineteenth century A.D.). The

commentary is of little or no value, either in a philosophical or

philological point of view. The writer is unable to explain

particular passages in any precise manner, and he is equally

incapable of grasping the whole. He does not take words in their

simple meaning or sentences in their natural connexion. He is

thinking, not of the context in Plato, but of the contemporary

Pythagorean philosophers and their wordy strife. He finds nothing

in the text which he does not bring to it. He is full of

Porphyry, Iamblichus and Plotinus, of misapplied logic, of

misunderstood grammar, and of the Orphic theology.

Although such a work can contribute little or nothing to the

understanding of Plato, it throws an interesting light on the

Alexandrian times; it realizes how a philosophy made up of words

only may create a deep and widespread enthusiasm, how the forms

of logic and rhetoric may usurp the place of reason and truth,

how all philosophies grow faded and discoloured, and are patched

and made up again like worn-out garments, and retain only a

second-hand existence. He who would study this degeneracy of

philosophy and of the Greek mind in the original cannot do better

than devote a few of his days and nights to the commentary of

Proclus on the Timaeus.

A very different account must be given of the short work entitled

‘Timaeus Locrus,’ which is a brief but clear analysis of the

Timaeus of Plato, omitting the introduction or dialogue and

making a few small additions. It does not allude to the original

from which it is taken; it is quite free from mysticism and

Neo-Platonism. In length it does not exceed a fifth part of the

Timaeus. It is written in the Doric dialect, and contains several

words which do not occur in classical Greek. No other indication

of its date, except this uncertain one of language, appears in

it. In several places the writer has simplified the language of

Plato, in a few others he has embellished and exaggerated it. He

generally preserves the thought of the original, but does not

copy the words. On the whole this little tract faithfully

reflects the meaning and spirit of the Timaeus.

From the garden of the Timaeus, as from the other dialogues of

Plato, we may still gather a few flowers and present them at

parting to the reader. There is nothing in Plato grander and

simpler than the conversation between Solon and the Egyptian

priest, in which the youthfulness of Hellas is contrasted with

the antiquity of Egypt. Here are to be found the famous words, ‘O

Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are ever young, and there is not an

old man among you’—which may be compared to the lively saying of

Hegel, that ‘Greek history began with the youth Achilles and left

off with the youth Alexander.’ The numerous arts of

verisimilitude by which Plato insinuates into the mind of the

reader the truth of his narrative have been already referred to.

Here occur a sentence or two not wanting in Platonic irony

(Greek—a word to the wise). ‘To know or tell the origin of the

other divinities is beyond us, and we must accept the traditions

of the men of old time who affirm themselves to be the offspring

of the Gods—that is what they say—and they must surely have known

their own ancestors. How can we doubt the word of the children of

the Gods? Although they give no probable or certain proofs,

still, as they declare that they are speaking of what took place

in their own family, we must conform to custom and believe them.’

‘Our creators well knew that women and other animals would some

day be framed out of men, and they further knew that many animals

would require the use of nails for many purposes; wherefore they

fashioned in men at their first creation the rudiments of nails.’

Or once more, let us reflect on two serious passages in which the

order of the world is supposed to find a place in the human soul

and to infuse harmony into it. ‘The soul, when touching anything

that has essence, whether dispersed in parts or undivided, is

stirred through all her powers to declare the sameness or

difference of that thing and some other; and to what individuals

are related, and by what affected, and in what way and how and

when, both in the world of generation and in the world of

immutable being. And when reason, which works with equal truth,

whether she be in the circle of the diverse or of the same,—in

voiceless silence holding her onward course in the sphere of the

self-moved,—when reason, I say, is hovering around the sensible

world, and when the circle of the diverse also moving truly

imparts the intimations of sense to the whole soul, then arise

opinions and beliefs sure and certain. But when reason is

concerned with the rational, and the circle of the same moving

smoothly declares it, then intelligence and knowledge are

necessarily perfected;’ where, proceeding in a similar path of

contemplation, he supposes the inward and the outer world

mutually to imply each other. ‘God invented and gave us sight to

the end that we might behold the courses of intelligence in the

heaven, and apply them to the courses of our own intelligence

which are akin to them, the unperturbed to the perturbed; and

that we, learning them and partaking of the natural truth of

reason, might imitate the absolutely unerring courses of God and

regulate our own vagaries.’ Or let us weigh carefully some other

profound thoughts, such as the following. ‘He who neglects

education walks lame to the end of his life, and returns

imperfect and good for nothing to the world below.’ ‘The father

and maker of all this universe is past finding out; and even if

we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible.’

‘Let me tell you then why the Creator made this world of

generation. He was good, and the good can never have jealousy of

anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all

things should be as like himself as they could be. This is in the

truest sense the origin of creation and of the world, as we shall

do well in believing on the testimony of wise men: God desired

that all things should be good and nothing bad, so far as this

was attainable.’ This is the leading thought in the Timaeus, just

as the IDEA of Good is the leading thought of the Republic, the

one expression describing the personal, the other the impersonal

Good or God, differing in form rather than in substance, and both

equally implying to the mind of Plato a divine reality. The

slight touch, perhaps ironical, contained in the words, ‘as we

shall do well in believing on the testimony of wise men,’ is very

characteristic of Plato.

TIMAEUS.

PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Socrates, Critias, Timaeus, Hermocrates.

SOCRATES: One, two, three; but where, my dear Timaeus, is the

fourth of those who were yesterday my guests and are to be my

entertainers to-day?

TIMAEUS: He has been taken ill, Socrates; for he would not

willingly have been absent from this gathering.

SOCRATES: Then, if he is not coming, you and the two others must

supply his place.

TIMAEUS: Certainly, and we will do all that we can; having been

handsomely entertained by you yesterday, those of us who remain

should be only too glad to return your hospitality.

SOCRATES: Do you remember what were the points of which I

required you to speak?

TIMAEUS: We remember some of them, and you will be here to remind

us of anything which we have forgotten: or rather, if we are not

troubling you, will you briefly recapitulate the whole, and then

the particulars will be more firmly fixed in our memories?

SOCRATES: To be sure I will: the chief theme of my yesterday’s

discourse was the State—how constituted and of what citizens

composed it would seem likely to be most perfect.

TIMAEUS: Yes, Socrates; and what you said of it was very much to

our mind.

SOCRATES: Did we not begin by separating the husbandmen and the

artisans from the class of defenders of the State?

TIMAEUS: Yes.

SOCRATES: And when we had given to each one that single

employment and particular art which was suited to his nature, we

spoke of those who were intended to be our warriors, and said

that they were to be guardians of the city against attacks from

within as well as from without, and to have no other employment;

they were to be merciful in judging their subjects, of whom they

were by nature friends, but fierce to their enemies, when they

came across them in battle.

TIMAEUS: Exactly.

SOCRATES: We said, if I am not mistaken, that the guardians

should be gifted with a temperament in a high degree both

passionate and philosophical; and that then they would be as they

ought to be, gentle to their friends and fierce with their

enemies.

TIMAEUS: Certainly.

SOCRATES: And what did we say of their education? Were they not

to be trained in gymnastic, and music, and all other sorts of

knowledge which were proper for them?

TIMAEUS: Very true.

SOCRATES: And being thus trained they were not to consider gold

or silver or anything else to be their own private property; they

were to be like hired troops, receiving pay for keeping guard

from those who were protected by them—the pay was to be no more

than would suffice for men of simple life; and they were to spend

in common, and to live together in the continual practice of

virtue, which was to be their sole pursuit.

TIMAEUS: That was also said.

SOCRATES: Neither did we forget the women; of whom we declared,

that their natures should be assimilated and brought into harmony

with those of the men, and that common pursuits should be

assigned to them both in time of war and in their ordinary life.

TIMAEUS: That, again, was as you say.

SOCRATES: And what about the procreation of children? Or rather

was not the proposal too singular to be forgotten? for all wives

and children were to be in common, to the intent that no one

should ever know his own child, but they were to imagine that

they were all one family; those who were within a suitable limit

of age were to be brothers and sisters, those who were of an

elder generation parents and grandparents, and those of a

younger, children and grandchildren.

TIMAEUS: Yes, and the proposal is easy to remember, as you say.

SOCRATES: And do you also remember how, with a view of securing

as far as we could the best breed, we said that the chief

magistrates, male and female, should contrive secretly, by the

use of certain lots, so to arrange the nuptial meeting, that the

bad of either sex and the good of either sex might pair with

their like; and there was to be no quarrelling on this account,

for they would imagine that the union was a mere accident, and

was to be attributed to the lot?

TIMAEUS: I remember.

SOCRATES: And you remember how we said that the children of the

good parents were to be educated, and the children of the bad

secretly dispersed among the inferior citizens; and while they

were all growing up the rulers were to be on the look-out, and to

bring up from below in their turn those who were worthy, and

those among themselves who were unworthy were to take the places

of those who came up?

TIMAEUS: True.

SOCRATES: Then have I now given you all the heads of our

yesterday’s discussion? Or is there anything more, my dear

Timaeus, which has been omitted?

TIMAEUS: Nothing, Socrates; it was just as you have said.

SOCRATES: I should like, before proceeding further, to tell you

how I feel about the State which we have described. I might

compare myself to a person who, on beholding beautiful animals

either created by the painter’s art, or, better still, alive but

at rest, is seized with a desire of seeing them in motion or

engaged in some struggle or conflict to which their forms appear

suited; this is my feeling about the State which we have been

describing. There are conflicts which all cities undergo, and I

should like to hear some one tell of our own city carrying on a

struggle against her neighbours, and how she went out to war in a

becoming manner, and when at war showed by the greatness of her

actions and the magnanimity of her words in dealing with other

cities a result worthy of her training and education. Now I,

Critias and Hermocrates, am conscious that I myself should never

be able to celebrate the city and her citizens in a befitting

manner, and I am not surprised at my own incapacity; to me the

wonder is rather that the poets present as well as past are no

better—not that I mean to depreciate them; but every one can see

that they are a tribe of imitators, and will imitate best and

most easily the life in which they have been brought up; while

that which is beyond the range of a man’s education he finds hard

to carry out in action, and still harder adequately to represent

in language. I am aware that the Sophists have plenty of brave

words and fair conceits, but I am afraid that being only

wanderers from one city to another, and having never had

habitations of their own, they may fail in their conception of

philosophers and statesmen, and may not know what they do and say

in time of war, when they are fighting or holding parley with

their enemies. And thus people of your class are the only ones

remaining who are fitted by nature and education to take part at

once both in politics and philosophy. Here is Timaeus, of Locris

in Italy, a city which has admirable laws, and who is himself in

wealth and rank the equal of any of his fellow-citizens; he has

held the most important and honourable offices in his own state,

and, as I believe, has scaled the heights of all philosophy; and

here is Critias, whom every Athenian knows to be no novice in the

matters of which we are speaking; and as to Hermocrates, I am

assured by many witnesses that his genius and education qualify

him to take part in any speculation of the kind. And therefore

yesterday when I saw that you wanted me to describe the formation

of the State, I readily assented, being very well aware, that, if

you only would, none were better qualified to carry the

discussion further, and that when you had engaged our city in a

suitable war, you of all men living could best exhibit her

playing a fitting part. When I had completed my task, I in return

imposed this other task upon you. You conferred together and

agreed to entertain me to-day, as I had entertained you, with a

feast of discourse. Here am I in festive array, and no man can be

more ready for the promised banquet.

HERMOCRATES: And we too, Socrates, as Timaeus says, will not be

wanting in enthusiasm; and there is no excuse for not complying

with your request. As soon as we arrived yesterday at the

guest-chamber of Critias, with whom we are staying, or rather on

our way thither, we talked the matter over, and he told us an

ancient tradition, which I wish, Critias, that you would repeat

to Socrates, so that he may help us to judge whether it will

satisfy his requirements or not.

CRITIAS: I will, if Timaeus, who is our other partner, approves.

TIMAEUS: I quite approve.

CRITIAS: Then listen, Socrates, to a tale which, though strange,

is certainly true, having been attested by Solon, who was the

wisest of the seven sages. He was a relative and a dear friend of

my great-grandfather, Dropides, as he himself says in many

passages of his poems; and he told the story to Critias, my

grandfather, who remembered and repeated it to us. There were of

old, he said, great and marvellous actions of the Athenian city,

which have passed into oblivion through lapse of time and the

destruction of mankind, and one in particular, greater than all

the rest. This we will now rehearse. It will be a fitting

monument of our gratitude to you, and a hymn of praise true and

worthy of the goddess, on this her day of festival.

SOCRATES: Very good. And what is this ancient famous action of

the Athenians, which Critias declared, on the authority of Solon,

to be not a mere legend, but an actual fact?

CRITIAS: I will tell an old-world story which I heard from an

aged man; for Critias, at the time of telling it, was, as he

said, nearly ninety years of age, and I was about ten. Now the

day was that day of the Apaturia which is called the Registration

of Youth, at which, according to custom, our parents gave prizes

for recitations, and the poems of several poets were recited by

us boys, and many of us sang the poems of Solon, which at that

time had not gone out of fashion. One of our tribe, either

because he thought so or to please Critias, said that in his

judgment Solon was not only the wisest of men, but also the

noblest of poets. The old man, as I very well remember,

brightened up at hearing this and said, smiling: Yes, Amynander,

if Solon had only, like other poets, made poetry the business of

his life, and had completed the tale which he brought with him

from Egypt, and had not been compelled, by reason of the factions

and troubles which he found stirring in his own country when he

came home, to attend to other matters, in my opinion he would

have been as famous as Homer or Hesiod, or any poet.

And what was the tale about, Critias? said Amynander.

About the greatest action which the Athenians ever did, and which

ought to have been the most famous, but, through the lapse of

time and the destruction of the actors, it has not come down to

us.

Tell us, said the other, the whole story, and how and from whom

Solon heard this veritable tradition.

He replied:—In the Egyptian Delta, at the head of which the river

Nile divides, there is a certain district which is called the

district of Sais, and the great city of the district is also

called Sais, and is the city from which King Amasis came. The

citizens have a deity for their foundress; she is called in the

Egyptian tongue Neith, and is asserted by them to be the same

whom the Hellenes call Athene; they are great lovers of the

Athenians, and say that they are in some way related to them. To

this city came Solon, and was received there with great honour;

he asked the priests who were most skilful in such matters, about

antiquity, and made the discovery that neither he nor any other

Hellene knew anything worth mentioning about the times of old. On

one occasion, wishing to draw them on to speak of antiquity, he

began to tell about the most ancient things in our part of the

world—about Phoroneus, who is called ‘the first man,’ and about

Niobe; and after the Deluge, of the survival of Deucalion and

Pyrrha; and he traced the genealogy of their descendants, and

reckoning up the dates, tried to compute how many years ago the

events of which he was speaking happened. Thereupon one of the

priests, who was of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you

Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old

man among you. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to

say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old

opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any

science which is hoary with age. And I will tell you why. There

have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind

arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about

by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by

innumerable other causes. There is a story, which even you have

preserved, that once upon a time Paethon, the son of Helios,

having yoked the steeds in his father’s chariot, because he was

not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all

that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a

thunderbolt. Now this has the form of a myth, but really

signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens

around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the

earth, which recurs after long intervals; at such times those who

live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more

liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the

seashore. And from this calamity the Nile, who is our

never-failing saviour, delivers and preserves us. When, on the

other hand, the gods purge the earth with a deluge of water, the

survivors in your country are herdsmen and shepherds who dwell on

the mountains, but those who, like you, live in cities are

carried by the rivers into the sea. Whereas in this land, neither

then nor at any other time, does the water come down from above

on the fields, having always a tendency to come up from below;

for which reason the traditions preserved here are the most

ancient. The fact is, that wherever the extremity of winter frost

or of summer sun does not prevent, mankind exist, sometimes in

greater, sometimes in lesser numbers. And whatever happened

either in your country or in ours, or in any other region of

which we are informed—if there were any actions noble or great or

in any other way remarkable, they have all been written down by

us of old, and are preserved in our temples. Whereas just when

you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters

and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual

interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes

pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of

letters and education; and so you have to begin all over again

like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient

times, either among us or among yourselves. As for those

genealogies of yours which you just now recounted to us, Solon,

they are no better than the tales of children. In the first place

you remember a single deluge only, but there were many previous

ones; in the next place, you do not know that there formerly

dwelt in your land the fairest and noblest race of men which ever

lived, and that you and your whole city are descended from a

small seed or remnant of them which survived. And this was

unknown to you, because, for many generations, the survivors of

that destruction died, leaving no written word. For there was a

time, Solon, before the great deluge of all, when the city which

now is Athens was first in war and in every way the best governed

of all cities, is said to have performed the noblest deeds and to

have had the fairest constitution of any of which tradition

tells, under the face of heaven. Solon marvelled at his words,

and earnestly requested the priests to inform him exactly and in

order about these former citizens. You are welcome to hear about

them, Solon, said the priest, both for your own sake and for that

of your city, and above all, for the sake of the goddess who is

the common patron and parent and educator of both our cities. She

founded your city a thousand years before ours (Observe that

Plato gives the same date (9000 years ago) for the foundation of

Athens and for the repulse of the invasion from Atlantis

(Crit.).), receiving from the Earth and Hephaestus the seed of

your race, and afterwards she founded ours, of which the

constitution is recorded in our sacred registers to be 8000 years

old. As touching your citizens of 9000 years ago, I will briefly

inform you of their laws and of their most famous action; the

exact particulars of the whole we will hereafter go through at

our leisure in the sacred registers themselves. If you compare

these very laws with ours you will find that many of ours are the

counterpart of yours as they were in the olden time. In the first

place, there is the caste of priests, which is separated from all

the others; next, there are the artificers, who ply their several

crafts by themselves and do not intermix; and also there is the

class of shepherds and of hunters, as well as that of husbandmen;

and you will observe, too, that the warriors in Egypt are

distinct from all the other classes, and are commanded by the law

to devote themselves solely to military pursuits; moreover, the

weapons which they carry are shields and spears, a style of

equipment which the goddess taught of Asiatics first to us, as in

your part of the world first to you. Then as to wisdom, do you

observe how our law from the very first made a study of the whole

order of things, extending even to prophecy and medicine which

gives health, out of these divine elements deriving what was

needful for human life, and adding every sort of knowledge which

was akin to them. All this order and arrangement the goddess

first imparted to you when establishing your city; and she chose

the spot of earth in which you were born, because she saw that

the happy temperament of the seasons in that land would produce

the wisest of men. Wherefore the goddess, who was a lover both of

war and of wisdom, selected and first of all settled that spot

which was the most likely to produce men likest herself. And

there you dwelt, having such laws as these and still better ones,

and excelled all mankind in all virtue, as became the children

and disciples of the gods.

Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in our

histories. But one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and

valour. For these histories tell of a mighty power which

unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and

Asia, and to which your city put an end. This power came forth

out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was

navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the

straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the

island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the

way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole

of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for

this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a

harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea,

and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless

continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and

wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several

others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the

men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the

columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as

Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavoured to

subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the

region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shone

forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all

mankind. She was pre-eminent in courage and military skill, and

was the leader of the Hellenes. And when the rest fell off from

her, being compelled to stand alone, after having undergone the

very extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed over the

invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet

subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us who dwell

within the pillars. But afterwards there occurred violent

earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of

misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth,

and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the

depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is

impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in

the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.

I have told you briefly, Socrates, what the aged Critias heard

from Solon and related to us. And when you were speaking

yesterday about your city and citizens, the tale which I have

just been repeating to you came into my mind, and I remarked with

astonishment how, by some mysterious coincidence, you agreed in

almost every particular with the narrative of Solon; but I did

not like to speak at the moment. For a long time had elapsed, and

I had forgotten too much; I thought that I must first of all run

over the narrative in my own mind, and then I would speak. And so

I readily assented to your request yesterday, considering that in

all such cases the chief difficulty is to find a tale suitable to

our purpose, and that with such a tale we should be fairly well

provided.

And therefore, as Hermocrates has told you, on my way home

yesterday I at once communicated the tale to my companions as I

remembered it; and after I left them, during the night by

thinking I recovered nearly the whole of it. Truly, as is often

said, the lessons of our childhood make a wonderful impression on

our memories; for I am not sure that I could remember all the

discourse of yesterday, but I should be much surprised if I

forgot any of these things which I have heard very long ago. I

listened at the time with childlike interest to the old man’s

narrative; he was very ready to teach me, and I asked him again

and again to repeat his words, so that like an indelible picture

they were branded into my mind. As soon as the day broke, I

rehearsed them as he spoke them to my companions, that they, as

well as myself, might have something to say. And now, Socrates,

to make an end of my preface, I am ready to tell you the whole

tale. I will give you not only the general heads, but the

particulars, as they were told to me. The city and citizens,

which you yesterday described to us in fiction, we will now

transfer to the world of reality. It shall be the ancient city of

Athens, and we will suppose that the citizens whom you imagined,

were our veritable ancestors, of whom the priest spoke; they will

perfectly harmonize, and there will be no inconsistency in saying

that the citizens of your republic are these ancient Athenians.

Let us divide the subject among us, and all endeavour according

to our ability gracefully to execute the task which you have

imposed upon us. Consider then, Socrates, if this narrative is

suited to the purpose, or whether we should seek for some other

instead.

SOCRATES: And what other, Critias, can we find that will be

better than this, which is natural and suitable to the festival

of the goddess, and has the very great advantage of being a fact

and not a fiction? How or where shall we find another if we

abandon this? We cannot, and therefore you must tell the tale,

and good luck to you; and I in return for my yesterday’s

discourse will now rest and be a listener.

CRITIAS: Let me proceed to explain to you, Socrates, the order in

which we have arranged our entertainment. Our intention is, that

Timaeus, who is the most of an astronomer amongst us, and has

made the nature of the universe his special study, should speak

first, beginning with the generation of the world and going down

to the creation of man; next, I am to receive the men whom he has

created, and of whom some will have profited by the excellent

education which you have given them; and then, in accordance with

the tale of Solon, and equally with his law, we will bring them

into court and make them citizens, as if they were those very

Athenians whom the sacred Egyptian record has recovered from

oblivion, and thenceforward we will speak of them as Athenians

and fellow-citizens.

SOCRATES: I see that I shall receive in my turn a perfect and

splendid feast of reason. And now, Timaeus, you, I suppose,

should speak next, after duly calling upon the Gods.

TIMAEUS: All men, Socrates, who have any degree of right feeling,

at the beginning of every enterprise, whether small or great,

always call upon God. And we, too, who are going to discourse of

the nature of the universe, how created or how existing without

creation, if we be not altogether out of our wits, must invoke

the aid of Gods and Goddesses and pray that our words may be

acceptable to them and consistent with themselves. Let this,

then, be our invocation of the Gods, to which I add an

exhortation of myself to speak in such manner as will be most

intelligible to you, and will most accord with my own intent.

First then, in my judgment, we must make a distinction and ask,

What is that which always is and has no becoming; and what is

that which is always becoming and never is? That which is

apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same

state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of

sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming

and perishing and never really is. Now everything that becomes or

is created must of necessity be created by some cause, for

without a cause nothing can be created. The work of the creator,

whenever he looks to the unchangeable and fashions the form and

nature of his work after an unchangeable pattern, must

necessarily be made fair and perfect; but when he looks to the

created only, and uses a created pattern, it is not fair or

perfect. Was the heaven then or the world, whether called by this

or by any other more appropriate name—assuming the name, I am

asking a question which has to be asked at the beginning of an

enquiry about anything—was the world, I say, always in existence

and without beginning? or created, and had it a beginning?

Created, I reply, being visible and tangible and having a body,

and therefore sensible; and all sensible things are apprehended

by opinion and sense and are in a process of creation and

created. Now that which is created must, as we affirm, of

necessity be created by a cause. But the father and maker of all

this universe is past finding out; and even if we found him, to

tell of him to all men would be impossible. And there is still a

question to be asked about him: Which of the patterns had the

artificer in view when he made the world—the pattern of the

unchangeable, or of that which is created? If the world be indeed

fair and the artificer good, it is manifest that he must have

looked to that which is eternal; but if what cannot be said

without blasphemy is true, then to the created pattern. Every one

will see that he must have looked to the eternal; for the world

is the fairest of creations and he is the best of causes. And

having been created in this way, the world has been framed in the

likeness of that which is apprehended by reason and mind and is

unchangeable, and must therefore of necessity, if this is

admitted, be a copy of something. Now it is all-important that

the beginning of everything should be according to nature. And in

speaking of the copy and the original we may assume that words

are akin to the matter which they describe; when they relate to

the lasting and permanent and intelligible, they ought to be

lasting and unalterable, and, as far as their nature allows,

irrefutable and immovable—nothing less. But when they express

only the copy or likeness and not the eternal things themselves,

they need only be likely and analogous to the real words. As

being is to becoming, so is truth to belief. If then, Socrates,

amid the many opinions about the gods and the generation of the

universe, we are not able to give notions which are altogether

and in every respect exact and consistent with one another, do

not be surprised. Enough, if we adduce probabilities as likely as

any others; for we must remember that I who am the speaker, and

you who are the judges, are only mortal men, and we ought to

accept the tale which is probable and enquire no further.

SOCRATES: Excellent, Timaeus; and we will do precisely as you bid

us. The prelude is charming, and is already accepted by us—may we

beg of you to proceed to the strain?

TIMAEUS: Let me tell you then why the creator made this world of

generation. He was good, and the good can never have any jealousy

of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all

things should be as like himself as they could be. This is in the

truest sense the origin of creation and of the world, as we shall

do well in believing on the testimony of wise men: God desired

that all things should be good and nothing bad, so far as this

was attainable. Wherefore also finding the whole visible sphere

not at rest, but moving in an irregular and disorderly fashion,

out of disorder he brought order, considering that this was in

every way better than the other. Now the deeds of the best could

never be or have been other than the fairest; and the creator,

reflecting on the things which are by nature visible, found that

no unintelligent creature taken as a whole was fairer than the

intelligent taken as a whole; and that intelligence could not be

present in anything which was devoid of soul. For which reason,

when he was framing the universe, he put intelligence in soul,

and soul in body, that he might be the creator of a work which

was by nature fairest and best. Wherefore, using the language of

probability, we may say that the world became a living creature

truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of

God.

This being supposed, let us proceed to the next stage: In the

likeness of what animal did the Creator make the world? It would

be an unworthy thing to liken it to any nature which exists as a

part only; for nothing can be beautiful which is like any

imperfect thing; but let us suppose the world to be the very

image of that whole of which all other animals both individually

and in their tribes are portions. For the original of the

universe contains in itself all intelligible beings, just as this

world comprehends us and all other visible creatures. For the

Deity, intending to make this world like the fairest and most

perfect of intelligible beings, framed one visible animal

comprehending within itself all other animals of a kindred

nature. Are we right in saying that there is one world, or that

they are many and infinite? There must be one only, if the

created copy is to accord with the original. For that which

includes all other intelligible creatures cannot have a second or

companion; in that case there would be need of another living

being which would include both, and of which they would be parts,

and the likeness would be more truly said to resemble not them,

but that other which included them. In order then that the world

might be solitary, like the perfect animal, the creator made not

two worlds or an infinite number of them; but there is and ever

will be one only-begotten and created heaven.

Now that which is created is of necessity corporeal, and also

visible and tangible. And nothing is visible where there is no

fire, or tangible which has no solidity, and nothing is solid

without earth. Wherefore also God in the beginning of creation

made the body of the universe to consist of fire and earth. But

two things cannot be rightly put together without a third; there

must be some bond of union between them. And the fairest bond is

that which makes the most complete fusion of itself and the

things which it combines; and proportion is best adapted to

effect such a union. For whenever in any three numbers, whether

cube or square, there is a mean, which is to the last term what

the first term is to it; and again, when the mean is to the first

term as the last term is to the mean—then the mean becoming first

and last, and the first and last both becoming means, they will

all of them of necessity come to be the same, and having become

the same with one another will be all one. If the universal frame

had been created a surface only and having no depth, a single

mean would have sufficed to bind together itself and the other

terms; but now, as the world must be solid, and solid bodies are

always compacted not by one mean but by two, God placed water and

air in the mean between fire and earth, and made them to have the

same proportion so far as was possible (as fire is to air so is

air to water, and as air is to water so is water to earth); and

thus he bound and put together a visible and tangible heaven. And

for these reasons, and out of such elements which are in number

four, the body of the world was created, and it was harmonized by

proportion, and therefore has the spirit of friendship; and

having been reconciled to itself, it was indissoluble by the hand

of any other than the framer.

Now the creation took up the whole of each of the four elements;

for the Creator compounded the world out of all the fire and all

the water and all the air and all the earth, leaving no part of

any of them nor any power of them outside. His intention was, in

the first place, that the animal should be as far as possible a

perfect whole and of perfect parts: secondly, that it should be

one, leaving no remnants out of which another such world might be

created: and also that it should be free from old age and

unaffected by disease. Considering that if heat and cold and

other powerful forces which unite bodies surround and attack them

from without when they are unprepared, they decompose them, and

by bringing diseases and old age upon them, make them waste

away—for this cause and on these grounds he made the world one

whole, having every part entire, and being therefore perfect and

not liable to old age and disease. And he gave to the world the

figure which was suitable and also natural. Now to the animal

which was to comprehend all animals, that figure was suitable

which comprehends within itself all other figures. Wherefore he

made the world in the form of a globe, round as from a lathe,

having its extremes in every direction equidistant from the

centre, the most perfect and the most like itself of all figures;

for he considered that the like is infinitely fairer than the

unlike. This he finished off, making the surface smooth all round

for many reasons; in the first place, because the living being

had no need of eyes when there was nothing remaining outside him

to be seen; nor of ears when there was nothing to be heard; and

there was no surrounding atmosphere to be breathed; nor would

there have been any use of organs by the help of which he might

receive his food or get rid of what he had already digested,

since there was nothing which went from him or came into him: for

there was nothing beside him. Of design he was created thus, his

own waste providing his own food, and all that he did or suffered

taking place in and by himself. For the Creator conceived that a

being which was self-sufficient would be far more excellent than

one which lacked anything; and, as he had no need to take

anything or defend himself against any one, the Creator did not

think it necessary to bestow upon him hands: nor had he any need

of feet, nor of the whole apparatus of walking; but the movement

suited to his spherical form was assigned to him, being of all

the seven that which is most appropriate to mind and

intelligence; and he was made to move in the same manner and on

the same spot, within his own limits revolving in a circle. All

the other six motions were taken away from him, and he was made

not to partake of their deviations. And as this circular movement

required no feet, the universe was created without legs and

without feet.

Such was the whole plan of the eternal God about the god that was

to be, to whom for this reason he gave a body, smooth and even,

having a surface in every direction equidistant from the centre,

a body entire and perfect, and formed out of perfect bodies. And

in the centre he put the soul, which he diffused throughout the

body, making it also to be the exterior environment of it; and he

made the universe a circle moving in a circle, one and solitary,

yet by reason of its excellence able to converse with itself, and

needing no other friendship or acquaintance. Having these

purposes in view he created the world a blessed god.

Now God did not make the soul after the body, although we are

speaking of them in this order; for having brought them together

he would never have allowed that the elder should be ruled by the

younger; but this is a random manner of speaking which we have,

because somehow we ourselves too are very much under the dominion

of chance. Whereas he made the soul in origin and excellence

prior to and older than the body, to be the ruler and mistress,

of whom the body was to be the subject. And he made her out of

the following elements and on this wise: Out of the indivisible

and unchangeable, and also out of that which is divisible and has

to do with material bodies, he compounded a third and

intermediate kind of essence, partaking of the nature of the same

and of the other, and this compound he placed accordingly in a

mean between the indivisible, and the divisible and material. He

took the three elements of the same, the other, and the essence,

and mingled them into one form, compressing by force the

reluctant and unsociable nature of the other into the same. When

he had mingled them with the essence and out of three made one,

he again divided this whole into as many portions as was fitting,

each portion being a compound of the same, the other, and the

essence. And he proceeded to divide after this manner:—First of

all, he took away one part of the whole (1), and then he

separated a second part which was double the first (2), and then

he took away a third part which was half as much again as the

second and three times as much as the first (3), and then he took

a fourth part which was twice as much as the second (4), and a

fifth part which was three times the third (9), and a sixth part

which was eight times the first (8), and a seventh part which was

twenty-seven times the first (27). After this he filled up the

double intervals (i.e. between 1, 2, 4, 8) and the triple (i.e.

between 1, 3, 9, 27) cutting off yet other portions from the

mixture and placing them in the intervals, so that in each

interval there were two kinds of means, the one exceeding and

exceeded by equal parts of its extremes (as for example 1, 4/3,

2, in which the mean 4/3 is one-third of 1 more than 1, and

one-third of 2 less than 2), the other being that kind of mean

which exceeds and is exceeded by an equal number (e.g.

- over 1, 4/3, 3/2, - over 2, 8/3, 3, - over 4, 16/3, 6, - over 8: and

- over 1, 3/2, 2, - over 3, 9/2, 6, - over 9, 27/2, 18, - over 27.

Where there were intervals of 3/2 and of 4/3 and of 9/8, made by

the connecting terms in the former intervals, he filled up all

the intervals of 4/3 with the interval of 9/8, leaving a fraction

over; and the interval which this fraction expressed was in the

ratio of 256 to 243 (e.g.

243:256::81/64:4/3::243/128:2::81/32:8/3::243/64:4::81/16:16/3::242/32:8.

And thus the whole mixture out of which he cut these portions was

all exhausted by him. This entire compound he divided lengthways

into two parts, which he joined to one another at the centre like

the letter X, and bent them into a circular form, connecting them

with themselves and each other at the point opposite to their

original meeting-point; and, comprehending them in a uniform

revolution upon the same axis, he made the one the outer and the

other the inner circle. Now the motion of the outer circle he

called the motion of the same, and the motion of the inner circle

the motion of the other or diverse. The motion of the same he

carried round by the side (i.e. of the rectangular figure

supposed to be inscribed in the circle of the Same) to the right,

and the motion of the diverse diagonally (i.e. across the

rectangular figure from corner to corner) to the left. And he

gave dominion to the motion of the same and like, for that he

left single and undivided; but the inner motion he divided in six

places and made seven unequal circles having their intervals in

ratios of two and three, three of each, and bade the orbits

proceed in a direction opposite to one another; and three (Sun,

Mercury, Venus) he made to move with equal swiftness, and the

remaining four (Moon, Saturn, Mars, Jupiter) to move with unequal

swiftness to the three and to one another, but in due proportion.

Now when the Creator had framed the soul according to his will,

he formed within her the corporeal universe, and brought the two

together, and united them centre to centre. The soul, interfused

everywhere from the centre to the circumference of heaven, of

which also she is the external envelopment, herself turning in

herself, began a divine beginning of never-ceasing and rational

life enduring throughout all time. The body of heaven is visible,

but the soul is invisible, and partakes of reason and harmony,

and being made by the best of intellectual and everlasting

natures, is the best of things created. And because she is

composed of the same and of the other and of the essence, these

three, and is divided and united in due proportion, and in her

revolutions returns upon herself, the soul, when touching

anything which has essence, whether dispersed in parts or

undivided, is stirred through all her powers, to declare the

sameness or difference of that thing and some other; and to what

individuals are related, and by what affected, and in what way

and how and when, both in the world of generation and in the

world of immutable being. And when reason, which works with equal

truth, whether she be in the circle of the diverse or of the

same—in voiceless silence holding her onward course in the sphere

of the self-moved—when reason, I say, is hovering around the

sensible world and when the circle of the diverse also moving

truly imparts the intimations of sense to the whole soul, then

arise opinions and beliefs sure and certain. But when reason is

concerned with the rational, and the circle of the same moving

smoothly declares it, then intelligence and knowledge are

necessarily perfected. And if any one affirms that in which these

two are found to be other than the soul, he will say the very

opposite of the truth.

When the father and creator saw the creature which he had made

moving and living, the created image of the eternal gods, he

rejoiced, and in his joy determined to make the copy still more

like the original; and as this was eternal, he sought to make the

universe eternal, so far as might be. Now the nature of the ideal

being was everlasting, but to bestow this attribute in its

fulness upon a creature was impossible. Wherefore he resolved to

have a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order the

heaven, he made this image eternal but moving according to

number, while eternity itself rests in unity; and this image we

call time. For there were no days and nights and months and years

before the heaven was created, but when he constructed the heaven

he created them also. They are all parts of time, and the past

and future are created species of time, which we unconsciously

but wrongly transfer to the eternal essence; for we say that he

‘was,’ he ‘is,’ he ‘will be,’ but the truth is that ‘is’ alone is

properly attributed to him, and that ‘was’ and ‘will be’ are only

to be spoken of becoming in time, for they are motions, but that

which is immovably the same cannot become older or younger by

time, nor ever did or has become, or hereafter will be, older or

younger, nor is subject at all to any of those states which

affect moving and sensible things and of which generation is the

cause. These are the forms of time, which imitates eternity and

revolves according to a law of number. Moreover, when we say that

what has become IS become and what becomes IS becoming, and that

what will become IS about to become and that the non-existent IS

non-existent—all these are inaccurate modes of expression

(compare Parmen.). But perhaps this whole subject will be more

suitably discussed on some other occasion.

Time, then, and the heaven came into being at the same instant in

order that, having been created together, if ever there was to be

a dissolution of them, they might be dissolved together. It was

framed after the pattern of the eternal nature, that it might

resemble this as far as was possible; for the pattern exists from

eternity, and the created heaven has been, and is, and will be,

in all time. Such was the mind and thought of God in the creation

of time. The sun and moon and five other stars, which are called

the planets, were created by him in order to distinguish and

preserve the numbers of time; and when he had made their several

bodies, he placed them in the orbits in which the circle of the

other was revolving,—in seven orbits seven stars. First, there

was the moon in the orbit nearest the earth, and next the sun, in

the second orbit above the earth; then came the morning star and

the star sacred to Hermes, moving in orbits which have an equal

swiftness with the sun, but in an opposite direction; and this is

the reason why the sun and Hermes and Lucifer overtake and are

overtaken by each other. To enumerate the places which he

assigned to the other stars, and to give all the reasons why he

assigned them, although a secondary matter, would give more

trouble than the primary. These things at some future time, when

we are at leisure, may have the consideration which they deserve,

but not at present.

Now, when all the stars which were necessary to the creation of

time had attained a motion suitable to them, and had become

living creatures having bodies fastened by vital chains, and

learnt their appointed task, moving in the motion of the diverse,

which is diagonal, and passes through and is governed by the

motion of the same, they revolved, some in a larger and some in a

lesser orbit—those which had the lesser orbit revolving faster,

and those which had the larger more slowly. Now by reason of the

motion of the same, those which revolved fastest appeared to be

overtaken by those which moved slower although they really

overtook them; for the motion of the same made them all turn in a

spiral, and, because some went one way and some another, that

which receded most slowly from the sphere of the same, which was

the swiftest, appeared to follow it most nearly. That there might

be some visible measure of their relative swiftness and slowness

as they proceeded in their eight courses, God lighted a fire,

which we now call the sun, in the second from the earth of these

orbits, that it might give light to the whole of heaven, and that

the animals, as many as nature intended, might participate in

number, learning arithmetic from the revolution of the same and

the like. Thus then, and for this reason the night and the day

were created, being the period of the one most intelligent

revolution. And the month is accomplished when the moon has

completed her orbit and overtaken the sun, and the year when the

sun has completed his own orbit. Mankind, with hardly an

exception, have not remarked the periods of the other stars, and

they have no name for them, and do not measure them against one

another by the help of number, and hence they can scarcely be

said to know that their wanderings, being infinite in number and

admirable for their variety, make up time. And yet there is no

difficulty in seeing that the perfect number of time fulfils the

perfect year when all the eight revolutions, having their

relative degrees of swiftness, are accomplished together and

attain their completion at the same time, measured by the

rotation of the same and equally moving. After this manner, and

for these reasons, came into being such of the stars as in their

heavenly progress received reversals of motion, to the end that

the created heaven might imitate the eternal nature, and be as

like as possible to the perfect and intelligible animal.

Thus far and until the birth of time the created universe was

made in the likeness of the original, but inasmuch as all animals

were not yet comprehended therein, it was still unlike. What

remained, the creator then proceeded to fashion after the nature

of the pattern. Now as in the ideal animal the mind perceives

ideas or species of a certain nature and number, he thought that

this created animal ought to have species of a like nature and

number. There are four such; one of them is the heavenly race of

the gods; another, the race of birds whose way is in the air; the

third, the watery species; and the fourth, the pedestrian and

land creatures. Of the heavenly and divine, he created the

greater part out of fire, that they might be the brightest of all

things and fairest to behold, and he fashioned them after the

likeness of the universe in the figure of a circle, and made them

follow the intelligent motion of the supreme, distributing them

over the whole circumference of heaven, which was to be a true

cosmos or glorious world spangled with them all over. And he gave

to each of them two movements: the first, a movement on the same

spot after the same manner, whereby they ever continue to think

consistently the same thoughts about the same things; the second,

a forward movement, in which they are controlled by the

revolution of the same and the like; but by the other five

motions they were unaffected, in order that each of them might

attain the highest perfection. And for this reason the fixed

stars were created, to be divine and eternal animals,

ever-abiding and revolving after the same manner and on the same

spot; and the other stars which reverse their motion and are

subject to deviations of this kind, were created in the manner

already described. The earth, which is our nurse, clinging (or

‘circling’) around the pole which is extended through the

universe, he framed to be the guardian and artificer of night and

day, first and eldest of gods that are in the interior of heaven.

Vain would be the attempt to tell all the figures of them

circling as in dance, and their juxtapositions, and the return of

them in their revolutions upon themselves, and their

approximations, and to say which of these deities in their

conjunctions meet, and which of them are in opposition, and in

what order they get behind and before one another, and when they

are severally eclipsed to our sight and again reappear, sending

terrors and intimations of the future to those who cannot

calculate their movements—to attempt to tell of all this without

a visible representation of the heavenly system would be labour

in vain. Enough on this head; and now let what we have said about

the nature of the created and visible gods have an end.

To know or tell the origin of the other divinities is beyond us,

and we must accept the traditions of the men of old time who

affirm themselves to be the offspring of the gods—that is what

they say—and they must surely have known their own ancestors. How

can we doubt the word of the children of the gods? Although they

give no probable or certain proofs, still, as they declare that

they are speaking of what took place in their own family, we must

conform to custom and believe them. In this manner, then,

according to them, the genealogy of these gods is to be received

and set forth.

Oceanus and Tethys were the children of Earth and Heaven, and

from these sprang Phorcys and Cronos and Rhea, and all that

generation; and from Cronos and Rhea sprang Zeus and Here, and

all those who are said to be their brethren, and others who were

the children of these.

Now, when all of them, both those who visibly appear in their

revolutions as well as those other gods who are of a more

retiring nature, had come into being, the creator of the universe

addressed them in these words: ‘Gods, children of gods, who are

my works, and of whom I am the artificer and father, my creations

are indissoluble, if so I will. All that is bound may be undone,

but only an evil being would wish to undo that which is

harmonious and happy. Wherefore, since ye are but creatures, ye

are not altogether immortal and indissoluble, but ye shall

certainly not be dissolved, nor be liable to the fate of death,

having in my will a greater and mightier bond than those with

which ye were bound at the time of your birth. And now listen to

my instructions:—Three tribes of mortal beings remain to be

created—without them the universe will be incomplete, for it will

not contain every kind of animal which it ought to contain, if it

is to be perfect. On the other hand, if they were created by me

and received life at my hands, they would be on an equality with

the gods. In order then that they may be mortal, and that this

universe may be truly universal, do ye, according to your

natures, betake yourselves to the formation of animals, imitating

the power which was shown by me in creating you. The part of them

worthy of the name immortal, which is called divine and is the

guiding principle of those who are willing to follow justice and

you—of that divine part I will myself sow the seed, and having

made a beginning, I will hand the work over to you. And do ye

then interweave the mortal with the immortal, and make and beget

living creatures, and give them food, and make them to grow, and

receive them again in death.’

Thus he spake, and once more into the cup in which he had

previously mingled the soul of the universe he poured the remains

of the elements, and mingled them in much the same manner; they

were not, however, pure as before, but diluted to the second and

third degree. And having made it he divided the whole mixture

into souls equal in number to the stars, and assigned each soul

to a star; and having there placed them as in a chariot, he

showed them the nature of the universe, and declared to them the

laws of destiny, according to which their first birth would be

one and the same for all,—no one should suffer a disadvantage at

his hands; they were to be sown in the instruments of time

severally adapted to them, and to come forth the most religious

of animals; and as human nature was of two kinds, the superior

race would hereafter be called man. Now, when they should be

implanted in bodies by necessity, and be always gaining or losing

some part of their bodily substance, then in the first place it

would be necessary that they should all have in them one and the

same faculty of sensation, arising out of irresistible

impressions; in the second place, they must have love, in which

pleasure and pain mingle; also fear and anger, and the feelings

which are akin or opposite to them; if they conquered these they

would live righteously, and if they were conquered by them,

unrighteously. He who lived well during his appointed time was to

return and dwell in his native star, and there he would have a

blessed and congenial existence. But if he failed in attaining

this, at the second birth he would pass into a woman, and if,

when in that state of being, he did not desist from evil, he

would continually be changed into some brute who resembled him in

the evil nature which he had acquired, and would not cease from

his toils and transformations until he followed the revolution of

the same and the like within him, and overcame by the help of

reason the turbulent and irrational mob of later accretions, made

up of fire and air and water and earth, and returned to the form

of his first and better state. Having given all these laws to his

creatures, that he might be guiltless of future evil in any of

them, the creator sowed some of them in the earth, and some in

the moon, and some in the other instruments of time; and when he

had sown them he committed to the younger gods the fashioning of

their mortal bodies, and desired them to furnish what was still

lacking to the human soul, and having made all the suitable

additions, to rule over them, and to pilot the mortal animal in

the best and wisest manner which they could, and avert from him

all but self-inflicted evils.

When the creator had made all these ordinances he remained in his

own accustomed nature, and his children heard and were obedient

to their father’s word, and receiving from him the immortal

principle of a mortal creature, in imitation of their own creator

they borrowed portions of fire, and earth, and water, and air

from the world, which were hereafter to be restored—these they

took and welded them together, not with the indissoluble chains

by which they were themselves bound, but with little pegs too

small to be visible, making up out of all the four elements each

separate body, and fastening the courses of the immortal soul in

a body which was in a state of perpetual influx and efflux. Now

these courses, detained as in a vast river, neither overcame nor

were overcome; but were hurrying and hurried to and fro, so that

the whole animal was moved and progressed, irregularly however

and irrationally and anyhow, in all the six directions of motion,

wandering backwards and forwards, and right and left, and up and

down, and in all the six directions. For great as was the

advancing and retiring flood which provided nourishment, the

affections produced by external contact caused still greater

tumult—when the body of any one met and came into collision with

some external fire, or with the solid earth or the gliding

waters, or was caught in the tempest borne on the air, and the

motions produced by any of these impulses were carried through

the body to the soul. All such motions have consequently received

the general name of ‘sensations,’ which they still retain. And

they did in fact at that time create a very great and mighty

movement; uniting with the ever-flowing stream in stirring up and

violently shaking the courses of the soul, they completely

stopped the revolution of the same by their opposing current, and

hindered it from predominating and advancing; and they so

disturbed the nature of the other or diverse, that the three

double intervals (i.e. between 1, 2, 4, 8), and the three triple

intervals (i.e. between 1, 3, 9, 27), together with the mean

terms and connecting links which are expressed by the ratios of

3:2, and 4:3, and of 9:8—these, although they cannot be wholly

undone except by him who united them, were twisted by them in all

sorts of ways, and the circles were broken and disordered in

every possible manner, so that when they moved they were tumbling

to pieces, and moved irrationally, at one time in a reverse

direction, and then again obliquely, and then upside down, as you

might imagine a person who is upside down and has his head

leaning upon the ground and his feet up against something in the

air; and when he is in such a position, both he and the spectator

fancy that the right of either is his left, and the left right.

If, when powerfully experiencing these and similar effects, the

revolutions of the soul come in contact with some external thing,

either of the class of the same or of the other, they speak of

the same or of the other in a manner the very opposite of the

truth; and they become false and foolish, and there is no course

or revolution in them which has a guiding or directing power; and

if again any sensations enter in violently from without and drag

after them the whole vessel of the soul, then the courses of the

soul, though they seem to conquer, are really conquered.

And by reason of all these affections, the soul, when encased in

a mortal body, now, as in the beginning, is at first without

intelligence; but when the flood of growth and nutriment abates,

and the courses of the soul, calming down, go their own way and

become steadier as time goes on, then the several circles return

to their natural form, and their revolutions are corrected, and

they call the same and the other by their right names, and make

the possessor of them to become a rational being. And if these

combine in him with any true nurture or education, he attains the

fulness and health of the perfect man, and escapes the worst

disease of all; but if he neglects education he walks lame to the

end of his life, and returns imperfect and good for nothing to

the world below. This, however, is a later stage; at present we

must treat more exactly the subject before us, which involves a

preliminary enquiry into the generation of the body and its

members, and as to how the soul was created—for what reason and

by what providence of the gods; and holding fast to probability,

we must pursue our way.

First, then, the gods, imitating the spherical shape of the

universe, enclosed the two divine courses in a spherical body,

that, namely, which we now term the head, being the most divine

part of us and the lord of all that is in us: to this the gods,

when they put together the body, gave all the other members to be

servants, considering that it partook of every sort of motion. In

order then that it might not tumble about among the high and deep

places of the earth, but might be able to get over the one and

out of the other, they provided the body to be its vehicle and

means of locomotion; which consequently had length and was

furnished with four limbs extended and flexible; these God

contrived to be instruments of locomotion with which it might

take hold and find support, and so be able to pass through all

places, carrying on high the dwelling-place of the most sacred

and divine part of us. Such was the origin of legs and hands,

which for this reason were attached to every man; and the gods,

deeming the front part of man to be more honourable and more fit

to command than the hinder part, made us to move mostly in a

forward direction. Wherefore man must needs have his front part

unlike and distinguished from the rest of his body.

And so in the vessel of the head, they first of all put a face in

which they inserted organs to minister in all things to the

providence of the soul, and they appointed this part, which has

authority, to be by nature the part which is in front. And of the

organs they first contrived the eyes to give light, and the

principle according to which they were inserted was as follows:

So much of fire as would not burn, but gave a gentle light, they

formed into a substance akin to the light of every-day life; and

the pure fire which is within us and related thereto they made to

flow through the eyes in a stream smooth and dense, compressing

the whole eye, and especially the centre part, so that it kept

out everything of a coarser nature, and allowed to pass only this

pure element. When the light of day surrounds the stream of

vision, then like falls upon like, and they coalesce, and one

body is formed by natural affinity in the line of vision,

wherever the light that falls from within meets with an external

object. And the whole stream of vision, being similarly affected

in virtue of similarity, diffuses the motions of what it touches

or what touches it over the whole body, until they reach the

soul, causing that perception which we call sight. But when night

comes on and the external and kindred fire departs, then the

stream of vision is cut off; for going forth to an unlike element

it is changed and extinguished, being no longer of one nature

with the surrounding atmosphere which is now deprived of fire:

and so the eye no longer sees, and we feel disposed to sleep. For

when the eyelids, which the gods invented for the preservation of

sight, are closed, they keep in the internal fire; and the power

of the fire diffuses and equalizes the inward motions; when they

are equalized, there is rest, and when the rest is profound,

sleep comes over us scarce disturbed by dreams; but where the

greater motions still remain, of whatever nature and in whatever

locality, they engender corresponding visions in dreams, which

are remembered by us when we are awake and in the external world.

And now there is no longer any difficulty in understanding the

creation of images in mirrors and all smooth and bright surfaces.

For from the communion of the internal and external fires, and

again from the union of them and their numerous transformations

when they meet in the mirror, all these appearances of necessity

arise, when the fire from the face coalesces with the fire from

the eye on the bright and smooth surface. And right appears left

and left right, because the visual rays come into contact with

the rays emitted by the object in a manner contrary to the usual

mode of meeting; but the right appears right, and the left left,

when the position of one of the two concurring lights is

reversed; and this happens when the mirror is concave and its

smooth surface repels the right stream of vision to the left

side, and the left to the right (He is speaking of two kinds of

mirrors, first the plane, secondly the concave; and the latter is

supposed to be placed, first horizontally, and then vertically.).

Or if the mirror be turned vertically, then the concavity makes

the countenance appear to be all upside down, and the lower rays

are driven upwards and the upper downwards.

All these are to be reckoned among the second and co-operative

causes which God, carrying into execution the idea of the best as

far as possible, uses as his ministers. They are thought by most

men not to be the second, but the prime causes of all things,

because they freeze and heat, and contract and dilate, and the

like. But they are not so, for they are incapable of reason or

intellect; the only being which can properly have mind is the

invisible soul, whereas fire and water, and earth and air, are

all of them visible bodies. The lover of intellect and knowledge

ought to explore causes of intelligent nature first of all, and,

secondly, of those things which, being moved by others, are

compelled to move others. And this is what we too must do. Both

kinds of causes should be acknowledged by us, but a distinction

should be made between those which are endowed with mind and are

the workers of things fair and good, and those which are deprived

of intelligence and always produce chance effects without order

or design. Of the second or co-operative causes of sight, which

help to give to the eyes the power which they now possess, enough

has been said. I will therefore now proceed to speak of the

higher use and purpose for which God has given them to us. The

sight in my opinion is the source of the greatest benefit to us,

for had we never seen the stars, and the sun, and the heaven,

none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would

ever have been uttered. But now the sight of day and night, and

the months and the revolutions of the years, have created number,

and have given us a conception of time, and the power of

enquiring about the nature of the universe; and from this source

we have derived philosophy, than which no greater good ever was

or will be given by the gods to mortal man. This is the greatest

boon of sight: and of the lesser benefits why should I speak?

even the ordinary man if he were deprived of them would bewail

his loss, but in vain. Thus much let me say however: God invented

and gave us sight to the end that we might behold the courses of

intelligence in the heaven, and apply them to the courses of our

own intelligence which are akin to them, the unperturbed to the

perturbed; and that we, learning them and partaking of the

natural truth of reason, might imitate the absolutely unerring

courses of God and regulate our own vagaries. The same may be

affirmed of speech and hearing: they have been given by the gods

to the same end and for a like reason. For this is the principal

end of speech, whereto it most contributes. Moreover, so much of

music as is adapted to the sound of the voice and to the sense of

hearing is granted to us for the sake of harmony; and harmony,

which has motions akin to the revolutions of our souls, is not

regarded by the intelligent votary of the Muses as given by them

with a view to irrational pleasure, which is deemed to be the

purpose of it in our day, but as meant to correct any discord

which may have arisen in the courses of the soul, and to be our

ally in bringing her into harmony and agreement with herself; and

rhythm too was given by them for the same reason, on account of

the irregular and graceless ways which prevail among mankind

generally, and to help us against them.

Thus far in what we have been saying, with small exception, the

works of intelligence have been set forth; and now we must place

by the side of them in our discourse the things which come into

being through necessity—for the creation is mixed, being made up

of necessity and mind. Mind, the ruling power, persuaded

necessity to bring the greater part of created things to

perfection, and thus and after this manner in the beginning, when

the influence of reason got the better of necessity, the universe

was created. But if a person will truly tell of the way in which

the work was accomplished, he must include the other influence of

the variable cause as well. Wherefore, we must return again and

find another suitable beginning, as about the former matters, so

also about these. To which end we must consider the nature of

fire, and water, and air, and earth, such as they were prior to

the creation of the heaven, and what was happening to them in

this previous state; for no one has as yet explained the manner

of their generation, but we speak of fire and the rest of them,

whatever they mean, as though men knew their natures, and we

maintain them to be the first principles and letters or elements

of the whole, when they cannot reasonably be compared by a man of

any sense even to syllables or first compounds. And let me say

thus much: I will not now speak of the first principle or

principles of all things, or by whatever name they are to be

called, for this reason—because it is difficult to set forth my

opinion according to the method of discussion which we are at

present employing. Do not imagine, any more than I can bring

myself to imagine, that I should be right in undertaking so great

and difficult a task. Remembering what I said at first about

probability, I will do my best to give as probable an explanation

as any other—or rather, more probable; and I will first go back

to the beginning and try to speak of each thing and of all. Once

more, then, at the commencement of my discourse, I call upon God,

and beg him to be our saviour out of a strange and unwonted

enquiry, and to bring us to the haven of probability. So now let

us begin again.

This new beginning of our discussion of the universe requires a

fuller division than the former; for then we made two classes,

now a third must be revealed. The two sufficed for the former

discussion: one, which we assumed, was a pattern intelligible and

always the same; and the second was only the imitation of the

pattern, generated and visible. There is also a third kind which

we did not distinguish at the time, conceiving that the two would

be enough. But now the argument seems to require that we should

set forth in words another kind, which is difficult of

explanation and dimly seen. What nature are we to attribute to

this new kind of being? We reply, that it is the receptacle, and

in a manner the nurse, of all generation. I have spoken the

truth; but I must express myself in clearer language, and this

will be an arduous task for many reasons, and in particular

because I must first raise questions concerning fire and the

other elements, and determine what each of them is; for to say,

with any probability or certitude, which of them should be called

water rather than fire, and which should be called any of them

rather than all or some one of them, is a difficult matter. How,

then, shall we settle this point, and what questions about the

elements may be fairly raised?

In the first place, we see that what we just now called water, by

condensation, I suppose, becomes stone and earth; and this same

element, when melted and dispersed, passes into vapour and air.

Air, again, when inflamed, becomes fire; and again fire, when

condensed and extinguished, passes once more into the form of

air; and once more, air, when collected and condensed, produces

cloud and mist; and from these, when still more compressed, comes

flowing water, and from water comes earth and stones once more;

and thus generation appears to be transmitted from one to the

other in a circle. Thus, then, as the several elements never

present themselves in the same form, how can any one have the

assurance to assert positively that any of them, whatever it may

be, is one thing rather than another? No one can. But much the

safest plan is to speak of them as follows:—Anything which we see

to be continually changing, as, for example, fire, we must not

call ‘this’ or ‘that,’ but rather say that it is ‘of such a

nature’; nor let us speak of water as ‘this’; but always as

‘such’; nor must we imply that there is any stability in any of

those things which we indicate by the use of the words ‘this’ and

‘that,’ supposing ourselves to signify something thereby; for

they are too volatile to be detained in any such expressions as

‘this,’ or ‘that,’ or ‘relative to this,’ or any other mode of

speaking which represents them as permanent. We ought not to

apply ‘this’ to any of them, but rather the word ‘such’; which

expresses the similar principle circulating in each and all of

them; for example, that should be called ‘fire’ which is of such

a nature always, and so of everything that has generation. That

in which the elements severally grow up, and appear, and decay,

is alone to be called by the name ‘this’ or ‘that’; but that

which is of a certain nature, hot or white, or anything which

admits of opposite qualities, and all things that are compounded

of them, ought not to be so denominated. Let me make another

attempt to explain my meaning more clearly. Suppose a person to

make all kinds of figures of gold and to be always transmuting

one form into all the rest;—somebody points to one of them and

asks what it is. By far the safest and truest answer is, That is

gold; and not to call the triangle or any other figures which are

formed in the gold ‘these,’ as though they had existence, since

they are in process of change while he is making the assertion;

but if the questioner be willing to take the safe and indefinite

expression, ‘such,’ we should be satisfied. And the same argument

applies to the universal nature which receives all bodies—that

must be always called the same; for, while receiving all things,

she never departs at all from her own nature, and never in any

way, or at any time, assumes a form like that of any of the

things which enter into her; she is the natural recipient of all

impressions, and is stirred and informed by them, and appears

different from time to time by reason of them. But the forms

which enter into and go out of her are the likenesses of real

existences modelled after their patterns in a wonderful and

inexplicable manner, which we will hereafter investigate. For the

present we have only to conceive of three natures: first, that

which is in process of generation; secondly, that in which the

generation takes place; and thirdly, that of which the thing

generated is a resemblance. And we may liken the receiving

principle to a mother, and the source or spring to a father, and

the intermediate nature to a child; and may remark further, that

if the model is to take every variety of form, then the matter in

which the model is fashioned will not be duly prepared, unless it

is formless, and free from the impress of any of those shapes

which it is hereafter to receive from without. For if the matter

were like any of the supervening forms, then whenever any

opposite or entirely different nature was stamped upon its

surface, it would take the impression badly, because it would

intrude its own shape. Wherefore, that which is to receive all

forms should have no form; as in making perfumes they first

contrive that the liquid substance which is to receive the scent

shall be as inodorous as possible; or as those who wish to

impress figures on soft substances do not allow any previous

impression to remain, but begin by making the surface as even and

smooth as possible. In the same way that which is to receive

perpetually and through its whole extent the resemblances of all

eternal beings ought to be devoid of any particular form.

Wherefore, the mother and receptacle of all created and visible

and in any way sensible things, is not to be termed earth, or

air, or fire, or water, or any of their compounds or any of the

elements from which these are derived, but is an invisible and

formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious

way partakes of the intelligible, and is most incomprehensible.

In saying this we shall not be far wrong; as far, however, as we

can attain to a knowledge of her from the previous

considerations, we may truly say that fire is that part of her

nature which from time to time is inflamed, and water that which

is moistened, and that the mother substance becomes earth and

air, in so far as she receives the impressions of them.

Let us consider this question more precisely. Is there any

self-existent fire? and do all those things which we call

self-existent exist? or are only those things which we see, or in

some way perceive through the bodily organs, truly existent, and

nothing whatever besides them? And is all that which we call an

intelligible essence nothing at all, and only a name? Here is a

question which we must not leave unexamined or undetermined, nor

must we affirm too confidently that there can be no decision;

neither must we interpolate in our present long discourse a

digression equally long, but if it is possible to set forth a

great principle in a few words, that is just what we want.

Thus I state my view:—If mind and true opinion are two distinct

classes, then I say that there certainly are these self-existent

ideas unperceived by sense, and apprehended only by the mind; if,

however, as some say, true opinion differs in no respect from

mind, then everything that we perceive through the body is to be

regarded as most real and certain. But we must affirm them to be

distinct, for they have a distinct origin and are of a different

nature; the one is implanted in us by instruction, the other by

persuasion; the one is always accompanied by true reason, the

other is without reason; the one cannot be overcome by

persuasion, but the other can: and lastly, every man may be said

to share in true opinion, but mind is the attribute of the gods

and of very few men. Wherefore also we must acknowledge that

there is one kind of being which is always the same, uncreated

and indestructible, never receiving anything into itself from

without, nor itself going out to any other, but invisible and

imperceptible by any sense, and of which the contemplation is

granted to intelligence only. And there is another nature of the

same name with it, and like to it, perceived by sense, created,

always in motion, becoming in place and again vanishing out of

place, which is apprehended by opinion and sense. And there is a

third nature, which is space, and is eternal, and admits not of

destruction and provides a home for all created things, and is

apprehended without the help of sense, by a kind of spurious

reason, and is hardly real; which we beholding as in a dream, say

of all existence that it must of necessity be in some place and

occupy a space, but that what is neither in heaven nor in earth

has no existence. Of these and other things of the same kind,

relating to the true and waking reality of nature, we have only

this dreamlike sense, and we are unable to cast off sleep and

determine the truth about them. For an image, since the reality,

after which it is modelled, does not belong to it, and it exists

ever as the fleeting shadow of some other, must be inferred to be

in another (i.e. in space), grasping existence in some way or

other, or it could not be at all. But true and exact reason,

vindicating the nature of true being, maintains that while two

things (i.e. the image and space) are different they cannot exist

one of them in the other and so be one and also two at the same

time.

Thus have I concisely given the result of my thoughts; and my

verdict is that being and space and generation, these three,

existed in their three ways before the heaven; and that the nurse

of generation, moistened by water and inflamed by fire, and

receiving the forms of earth and air, and experiencing all the

affections which accompany these, presented a strange variety of

appearances; and being full of powers which were neither similar

nor equally balanced, was never in any part in a state of

equipoise, but swaying unevenly hither and thither, was shaken by

them, and by its motion again shook them; and the elements when

moved were separated and carried continually, some one way, some

another; as, when grain is shaken and winnowed by fans and other

instruments used in the threshing of corn, the close and heavy

particles are borne away and settle in one direction, and the

loose and light particles in another. In this manner, the four

kinds or elements were then shaken by the receiving vessel,

which, moving like a winnowing machine, scattered far away from

one another the elements most unlike, and forced the most similar

elements into close contact. Wherefore also the various elements

had different places before they were arranged so as to form the

universe. At first, they were all without reason and measure. But

when the world began to get into order, fire and water and earth

and air had only certain faint traces of themselves, and were

altogether such as everything might be expected to be in the

absence of God; this, I say, was their nature at that time, and

God fashioned them by form and number. Let it be consistently

maintained by us in all that we say that God made them as far as

possible the fairest and best, out of things which were not fair

and good. And now I will endeavour to show you the disposition

and generation of them by an unaccustomed argument, which I am

compelled to use; but I believe that you will be able to follow

me, for your education has made you familiar with the methods of

science.

In the first place, then, as is evident to all, fire and earth

and water and air are bodies. And every sort of body possesses

solidity, and every solid must necessarily be contained in

planes; and every plane rectilinear figure is composed of

triangles; and all triangles are originally of two kinds, both of

which are made up of one right and two acute angles; one of them

has at either end of the base the half of a divided right angle,

having equal sides, while in the other the right angle is divided

into unequal parts, having unequal sides. These, then, proceeding

by a combination of probability with demonstration, we assume to

be the original elements of fire and the other bodies; but the

principles which are prior to these God only knows, and he of men

who is the friend of God. And next we have to determine what are

the four most beautiful bodies which are unlike one another, and

of which some are capable of resolution into one another; for

having discovered thus much, we shall know the true origin of

earth and fire and of the proportionate and intermediate

elements. And then we shall not be willing to allow that there

are any distinct kinds of visible bodies fairer than these.

Wherefore we must endeavour to construct the four forms of bodies

which excel in beauty, and then we shall be able to say that we

have sufficiently apprehended their nature. Now of the two

triangles, the isosceles has one form only; the scalene or

unequal-sided has an infinite number. Of the infinite forms we

must select the most beautiful, if we are to proceed in due

order, and any one who can point out a more beautiful form than

ours for the construction of these bodies, shall carry off the

palm, not as an enemy, but as a friend. Now, the one which we

maintain to be the most beautiful of all the many triangles (and

we need not speak of the others) is that of which the double

forms a third triangle which is equilateral; the reason of this

would be long to tell; he who disproves what we are saying, and

shows that we are mistaken, may claim a friendly victory. Then

let us choose two triangles, out of which fire and the other

elements have been constructed, one isosceles, the other having

the square of the longer side equal to three times the square of

the lesser side.

Now is the time to explain what was before obscurely said: there

was an error in imagining that all the four elements might be

generated by and into one another; this, I say, was an erroneous

supposition, for there are generated from the triangles which we

have selected four kinds—three from the one which has the sides

unequal; the fourth alone is framed out of the isosceles

triangle. Hence they cannot all be resolved into one another, a

great number of small bodies being combined into a few large

ones, or the converse. But three of them can be thus resolved and

compounded, for they all spring from one, and when the greater

bodies are broken up, many small bodies will spring up out of

them and take their own proper figures; or, again, when many

small bodies are dissolved into their triangles, if they become

one, they will form one large mass of another kind. So much for

their passage into one another. I have now to speak of their

several kinds, and show out of what combinations of numbers each

of them was formed. The first will be the simplest and smallest

construction, and its element is that triangle which has its

hypotenuse twice the lesser side. When two such triangles are

joined at the diagonal, and this is repeated three times, and the

triangles rest their diagonals and shorter sides on the same

point as a centre, a single equilateral triangle is formed out of

six triangles; and four equilateral triangles, if put together,

make out of every three plane angles one solid angle, being that

which is nearest to the most obtuse of plane angles; and out of

the combination of these four angles arises the first solid form

which distributes into equal and similar parts the whole circle

in which it is inscribed. The second species of solid is formed

out of the same triangles, which unite as eight equilateral

triangles and form one solid angle out of four plane angles, and

out of six such angles the second body is completed. And the

third body is made up of 120 triangular elements, forming twelve

solid angles, each of them included in five plane equilateral

triangles, having altogether twenty bases, each of which is an

equilateral triangle. The one element (that is, the triangle

which has its hypotenuse twice the lesser side) having generated

these figures, generated no more; but the isosceles triangle

produced the fourth elementary figure, which is compounded of

four such triangles, joining their right angles in a centre, and

forming one equilateral quadrangle. Six of these united form

eight solid angles, each of which is made by the combination of

three plane right angles; the figure of the body thus composed is

a cube, having six plane quadrangular equilateral bases. There

was yet a fifth combination which God used in the delineation of

the universe.

Now, he who, duly reflecting on all this, enquires whether the

worlds are to be regarded as indefinite or definite in number,

will be of opinion that the notion of their indefiniteness is

characteristic of a sadly indefinite and ignorant mind. He,

however, who raises the question whether they are to be truly

regarded as one or five, takes up a more reasonable position.

Arguing from probabilities, I am of opinion that they are one;

another, regarding the question from another point of view, will

be of another mind. But, leaving this enquiry, let us proceed to

distribute the elementary forms, which have now been created in

idea, among the four elements.

To earth, then, let us assign the cubical form; for earth is the

most immoveable of the four and the most plastic of all bodies,

and that which has the most stable bases must of necessity be of

such a nature. Now, of the triangles which we assumed at first,

that which has two equal sides is by nature more firmly based

than that which has unequal sides; and of the compound figures

which are formed out of either, the plane equilateral quadrangle

has necessarily a more stable basis than the equilateral

triangle, both in the whole and in the parts. Wherefore, in

assigning this figure to earth, we adhere to probability; and to

water we assign that one of the remaining forms which is the

least moveable; and the most moveable of them to fire; and to air

that which is intermediate. Also we assign the smallest body to

fire, and the greatest to water, and the intermediate in size to

air; and, again, the acutest body to fire, and the next in

acuteness to air, and the third to water. Of all these elements,

that which has the fewest bases must necessarily be the most

moveable, for it must be the acutest and most penetrating in

every way, and also the lightest as being composed of the

smallest number of similar particles: and the second body has

similar properties in a second degree, and the third body in the

third degree. Let it be agreed, then, both according to strict

reason and according to probability, that the pyramid is the

solid which is the original element and seed of fire; and let us

assign the element which was next in the order of generation to

air, and the third to water. We must imagine all these to be so

small that no single particle of any of the four kinds is seen by

us on account of their smallness: but when many of them are

collected together their aggregates are seen. And the ratios of

their numbers, motions, and other properties, everywhere God, as

far as necessity allowed or gave consent, has exactly perfected,

and harmonized in due proportion.

From all that we have just been saying about the elements or

kinds, the most probable conclusion is as follows:—earth, when

meeting with fire and dissolved by its sharpness, whether the

dissolution take place in the fire itself or perhaps in some mass

of air or water, is borne hither and thither, until its parts,

meeting together and mutually harmonising, again become earth;

for they can never take any other form. But water, when divided

by fire or by air, on re-forming, may become one part fire and

two parts air; and a single volume of air divided becomes two of

fire. Again, when a small body of fire is contained in a larger

body of air or water or earth, and both are moving, and the fire

struggling is overcome and broken up, then two volumes of fire

form one volume of air; and when air is overcome and cut up into

small pieces, two and a half parts of air are condensed into one

part of water. Let us consider the matter in another way. When

one of the other elements is fastened upon by fire, and is cut by

the sharpness of its angles and sides, it coalesces with the

fire, and then ceases to be cut by them any longer. For no

element which is one and the same with itself can be changed by

or change another of the same kind and in the same state. But so

long as in the process of transition the weaker is fighting

against the stronger, the dissolution continues. Again, when a

few small particles, enclosed in many larger ones, are in process

of decomposition and extinction, they only cease from their

tendency to extinction when they consent to pass into the

conquering nature, and fire becomes air and air water. But if

bodies of another kind go and attack them (i.e. the small

particles), the latter continue to be dissolved until, being

completely forced back and dispersed, they make their escape to

their own kindred, or else, being overcome and assimilated to the

conquering power, they remain where they are and dwell with their

victors, and from being many become one. And owing to these

affections, all things are changing their place, for by the

motion of the receiving vessel the bulk of each class is

distributed into its proper place; but those things which become

unlike themselves and like other things, are hurried by the

shaking into the place of the things to which they grow like.

Now all unmixed and primary bodies are produced by such causes as

these. As to the subordinate species which are included in the

greater kinds, they are to be attributed to the varieties in the

structure of the two original triangles. For either structure did

not originally produce the triangle of one size only, but some

larger and some smaller, and there are as many sizes as there are

species of the four elements. Hence when they are mingled with

themselves and with one another there is an endless variety of

them, which those who would arrive at the probable truth of

nature ought duly to consider.

Unless a person comes to an understanding about the nature and

conditions of rest and motion, he will meet with many

difficulties in the discussion which follows. Something has been

said of this matter already, and something more remains to be

said, which is, that motion never exists in what is uniform. For

to conceive that anything can be moved without a mover is hard or

indeed impossible, and equally impossible to conceive that there

can be a mover unless there be something which can be

moved—motion cannot exist where either of these are wanting, and

for these to be uniform is impossible; wherefore we must assign

rest to uniformity and motion to the want of uniformity. Now

inequality is the cause of the nature which is wanting in

uniformity; and of this we have already described the origin. But

there still remains the further point—why things when divided

after their kinds do not cease to pass through one another and to

change their place—which we will now proceed to explain. In the

revolution of the universe are comprehended all the four

elements, and this being circular and having a tendency to come

together, compresses everything and will not allow any place to

be left void. Wherefore, also, fire above all things penetrates

everywhere, and air next, as being next in rarity of the

elements; and the two other elements in like manner penetrate

according to their degrees of rarity. For those things which are

composed of the largest particles have the largest void left in

their compositions, and those which are composed of the smallest

particles have the least. And the contraction caused by the

compression thrusts the smaller particles into the interstices of

the larger. And thus, when the small parts are placed side by

side with the larger, and the lesser divide the greater and the

greater unite the lesser, all the elements are borne up and down

and hither and thither towards their own places; for the change

in the size of each changes its position in space. And these

causes generate an inequality which is always maintained, and is

continually creating a perpetual motion of the elements in all

time.

In the next place we have to consider that there are divers kinds

of fire. There are, for example, first, flame; and secondly,

those emanations of flame which do not burn but only give light

to the eyes; thirdly, the remains of fire, which are seen in

red-hot embers after the flame has been extinguished. There are

similar differences in the air; of which the brightest part is

called the aether, and the most turbid sort mist and darkness;

and there are various other nameless kinds which arise from the

inequality of the triangles. Water, again, admits in the first

place of a division into two kinds; the one liquid and the other

fusile. The liquid kind is composed of the small and unequal

particles of water; and moves itself and is moved by other bodies

owing to the want of uniformity and the shape of its particles;

whereas the fusile kind, being formed of large and uniform

particles, is more stable than the other, and is heavy and

compact by reason of its uniformity. But when fire gets in and

dissolves the particles and destroys the uniformity, it has

greater mobility, and becoming fluid is thrust forth by the

neighbouring air and spreads upon the earth; and this dissolution

of the solid masses is called melting, and their spreading out

upon the earth flowing. Again, when the fire goes out of the

fusile substance, it does not pass into a vacuum, but into the

neighbouring air; and the air which is displaced forces together

the liquid and still moveable mass into the place which was

occupied by the fire, and unites it with itself. Thus compressed

the mass resumes its equability, and is again at unity with

itself, because the fire which was the author of the inequality

has retreated; and this departure of the fire is called cooling,

and the coming together which follows upon it is termed

congealment. Of all the kinds termed fusile, that which is the

densest and is formed out of the finest and most uniform parts is

that most precious possession called gold, which is hardened by

filtration through rock; this is unique in kind, and has both a

glittering and a yellow colour. A shoot of gold, which is so

dense as to be very hard, and takes a black colour, is termed

adamant. There is also another kind which has parts nearly like

gold, and of which there are several species; it is denser than

gold, and it contains a small and fine portion of earth, and is

therefore harder, yet also lighter because of the great

interstices which it has within itself; and this substance, which

is one of the bright and denser kinds of water, when solidified

is called copper. There is an alloy of earth mingled with it,

which, when the two parts grow old and are disunited, shows

itself separately and is called rust. The remaining phenomena of

the same kind there will be no difficulty in reasoning out by the

method of probabilities. A man may sometimes set aside

meditations about eternal things, and for recreation turn to

consider the truths of generation which are probable only; he

will thus gain a pleasure not to be repented of, and secure for

himself while he lives a wise and moderate pastime. Let us grant

ourselves this indulgence, and go through the probabilities

relating to the same subjects which follow next in order.

Water which is mingled with fire, so much as is fine and liquid

(being so called by reason of its motion and the way in which it

rolls along the ground), and soft, because its bases give way and

are less stable than those of earth, when separated from fire and

air and isolated, becomes more uniform, and by their retirement

is compressed into itself; and if the condensation be very great,

the water above the earth becomes hail, but on the earth, ice;

and that which is congealed in a less degree and is only half

solid, when above the earth is called snow, and when upon the

earth, and condensed from dew, hoar-frost. Then, again, there are

the numerous kinds of water which have been mingled with one

another, and are distilled through plants which grow in the

earth; and this whole class is called by the name of juices or

saps. The unequal admixture of these fluids creates a variety of

species; most of them are nameless, but four which are of a fiery

nature are clearly distinguished and have names. First, there is

wine, which warms the soul as well as the body: secondly, there

is the oily nature, which is smooth and divides the visual ray,

and for this reason is bright and shining and of a glistening

appearance, including pitch, the juice of the castor berry, oil

itself, and other things of a like kind: thirdly, there is the

class of substances which expand the contracted parts of the

mouth, until they return to their natural state, and by reason of

this property create sweetness;—these are included under the

general name of honey: and, lastly, there is a frothy nature,

which differs from all juices, having a burning quality which

dissolves the flesh; it is called opos (a vegetable acid).

As to the kinds of earth, that which is filtered through water

passes into stone in the following manner:—The water which mixes

with the earth and is broken up in the process changes into air,

and taking this form mounts into its own place. But as there is

no surrounding vacuum it thrusts away the neighbouring air, and

this being rendered heavy, and, when it is displaced, having been

poured around the mass of earth, forcibly compresses it and

drives it into the vacant space whence the new air had come up;

and the earth when compressed by the air into an indissoluble

union with water becomes rock. The fairer sort is that which is

made up of equal and similar parts and is transparent; that which

has the opposite qualities is inferior. But when all the watery

part is suddenly drawn out by fire, a more brittle substance is

formed, to which we give the name of pottery. Sometimes also

moisture may remain, and the earth which has been fused by fire

becomes, when cool, a certain stone of a black colour. A like

separation of the water which had been copiously mingled with

them may occur in two substances composed of finer particles of

earth and of a briny nature; out of either of them a

half-solid-body is then formed, soluble in water—the one, soda,

which is used for purging away oil and earth, the other, salt,

which harmonizes so well in combinations pleasing to the palate,

and is, as the law testifies, a substance dear to the gods. The

compounds of earth and water are not soluble by water, but by

fire only, and for this reason:—Neither fire nor air melt masses

of earth; for their particles, being smaller than the interstices

in its structure, have plenty of room to move without forcing

their way, and so they leave the earth unmelted and undissolved;

but particles of water, which are larger, force a passage, and

dissolve and melt the earth. Wherefore earth when not

consolidated by force is dissolved by water only; when

consolidated, by nothing but fire; for this is the only body

which can find an entrance. The cohesion of water again, when

very strong, is dissolved by fire only—when weaker, then either

by air or fire—the former entering the interstices, and the

latter penetrating even the triangles. But nothing can dissolve

air, when strongly condensed, which does not reach the elements

or triangles; or if not strongly condensed, then only fire can

dissolve it. As to bodies composed of earth and water, while the

water occupies the vacant interstices of the earth in them which

are compressed by force, the particles of water which approach

them from without, finding no entrance, flow around the entire

mass and leave it undissolved; but the particles of fire,

entering into the interstices of the water, do to the water what

water does to earth and fire to air (The text seems to be

corrupt.), and are the sole causes of the compound body of earth

and water liquefying and becoming fluid. Now these bodies are of

two kinds; some of them, such as glass and the fusible sort of

stones, have less water than they have earth; on the other hand,

substances of the nature of wax and incense have more of water

entering into their composition.

I have thus shown the various classes of bodies as they are

diversified by their forms and combinations and changes into one

another, and now I must endeavour to set forth their affections

and the causes of them. In the first place, the bodies which I

have been describing are necessarily objects of sense. But we

have not yet considered the origin of flesh, or what belongs to

flesh, or of that part of the soul which is mortal. And these

things cannot be adequately explained without also explaining the

affections which are concerned with sensation, nor the latter

without the former: and yet to explain them together is hardly

possible; for which reason we must assume first one or the other

and afterwards examine the nature of our hypothesis. In order,

then, that the affections may follow regularly after the

elements, let us presuppose the existence of body and soul.

First, let us enquire what we mean by saying that fire is hot;

and about this we may reason from the dividing or cutting power

which it exercises on our bodies. We all of us feel that fire is

sharp; and we may further consider the fineness of the sides, and

the sharpness of the angles, and the smallness of the particles,

and the swiftness of the motion—all this makes the action of fire

violent and sharp, so that it cuts whatever it meets. And we must

not forget that the original figure of fire (i.e. the pyramid),

more than any other form, has a dividing power which cuts our

bodies into small pieces (Kepmatizei), and thus naturally

produces that affection which we call heat; and hence the origin

of the name (thepmos, Kepma). Now, the opposite of this is

sufficiently manifest; nevertheless we will not fail to describe

it. For the larger particles of moisture which surround the body,

entering in and driving out the lesser, but not being able to

take their places, compress the moist principle in us; and this

from being unequal and disturbed, is forced by them into a state

of rest, which is due to equability and compression. But things

which are contracted contrary to nature are by nature at war, and

force themselves apart; and to this war and convulsion the name

of shivering and trembling is given; and the whole affection and

the cause of the affection are both termed cold. That is called

hard to which our flesh yields, and soft which yields to our

flesh; and things are also termed hard and soft relatively to one

another. That which yields has a small base; but that which rests

on quadrangular bases is firmly posed and belongs to the class

which offers the greatest resistance; so too does that which is

the most compact and therefore most repellent. The nature of the

light and the heavy will be best understood when examined in

connexion with our notions of above and below; for it is quite a

mistake to suppose that the universe is parted into two regions,

separate from and opposite to each other, the one a lower to

which all things tend which have any bulk, and an upper to which

things only ascend against their will. For as the universe is in

the form of a sphere, all the extremities, being equidistant from

the centre, are equally extremities, and the centre, which is

equidistant from them, is equally to be regarded as the opposite

of them all. Such being the nature of the world, when a person

says that any of these points is above or below, may he not be

justly charged with using an improper expression? For the centre

of the world cannot be rightly called either above or below, but

is the centre and nothing else; and the circumference is not the

centre, and has in no one part of itself a different relation to

the centre from what it has in any of the opposite parts. Indeed,

when it is in every direction similar, how can one rightly give

to it names which imply opposition? For if there were any solid

body in equipoise at the centre of the universe, there would be

nothing to draw it to this extreme rather than to that, for they

are all perfectly similar; and if a person were to go round the

world in a circle, he would often, when standing at the antipodes

of his former position, speak of the same point as above and

below; for, as I was saying just now, to speak of the whole which

is in the form of a globe as having one part above and another

below is not like a sensible man. The reason why these names are

used, and the circumstances under which they are ordinarily

applied by us to the division of the heavens, may be elucidated

by the following supposition:—if a person were to stand in that

part of the universe which is the appointed place of fire, and

where there is the great mass of fire to which fiery bodies

gather—if, I say, he were to ascend thither, and, having the

power to do this, were to abstract particles of fire and put them

in scales and weigh them, and then, raising the balance, were to

draw the fire by force towards the uncongenial element of the

air, it would be very evident that he could compel the smaller

mass more readily than the larger; for when two things are

simultaneously raised by one and the same power, the smaller body

must necessarily yield to the superior power with less reluctance

than the larger; and the larger body is called heavy and said to

tend downwards, and the smaller body is called light and said to

tend upwards. And we may detect ourselves who are upon the earth

doing precisely the same thing. For we often separate earthy

natures, and sometimes earth itself, and draw them into the

uncongenial element of air by force and contrary to nature, both

clinging to their kindred elements. But that which is smaller

yields to the impulse given by us towards the dissimilar element

more easily than the larger; and so we call the former light, and

the place towards which it is impelled we call above, and the

contrary state and place we call heavy and below respectively.

Now the relations of these must necessarily vary, because the

principal masses of the different elements hold opposite

positions; for that which is light, heavy, below or above in one

place will be found to be and become contrary and transverse and

every way diverse in relation to that which is light, heavy,

below or above in an opposite place. And about all of them this

has to be considered:—that the tendency of each towards its

kindred element makes the body which is moved heavy, and the

place towards which the motion tends below, but things which have

an opposite tendency we call by an opposite name. Such are the

causes which we assign to these phenomena. As to the smooth and

the rough, any one who sees them can explain the reason of them

to another. For roughness is hardness mingled with irregularity,

and smoothness is produced by the joint effect of uniformity and

density.

The most important of the affections which concern the whole body

remains to be considered—that is, the cause of pleasure and pain

in the perceptions of which I have been speaking, and in all

other things which are perceived by sense through the parts of

the body, and have both pains and pleasures attendant on them.

Let us imagine the causes of every affection, whether of sense or

not, to be of the following nature, remembering that we have

already distinguished between the nature which is easy and which

is hard to move; for this is the direction in which we must hunt

the prey which we mean to take. A body which is of a nature to be

easily moved, on receiving an impression however slight, spreads

abroad the motion in a circle, the parts communicating with each

other, until at last, reaching the principle of mind, they

announce the quality of the agent. But a body of the opposite

kind, being immobile, and not extending to the surrounding

region, merely receives the impression, and does not stir any of

the neighbouring parts; and since the parts do not distribute the

original impression to other parts, it has no effect of motion on

the whole animal, and therefore produces no effect on the

patient. This is true of the bones and hair and other more earthy

parts of the human body; whereas what was said above relates

mainly to sight and hearing, because they have in them the

greatest amount of fire and air. Now we must conceive of pleasure

and pain in this way. An impression produced in us contrary to

nature and violent, if sudden, is painful; and, again, the sudden

return to nature is pleasant; but a gentle and gradual return is

imperceptible and vice versa. On the other hand the impression of

sense which is most easily produced is most readily felt, but is

not accompanied by pleasure or pain; such, for example, are the

affections of the sight, which, as we said above, is a body

naturally uniting with our body in the day-time; for cuttings and

burnings and other affections which happen to the sight do not

give pain, nor is there pleasure when the sight returns to its

natural state; but the sensations are clearest and strongest

according to the manner in which the eye is affected by the

object, and itself strikes and touches it; there is no violence

either in the contraction or dilation of the eye. But bodies

formed of larger particles yield to the agent only with a

struggle; and then they impart their motions to the whole and

cause pleasure and pain—pain when alienated from their natural

conditions, and pleasure when restored to them. Things which

experience gradual withdrawings and emptyings of their nature,

and great and sudden replenishments, fail to perceive the

emptying, but are sensible of the replenishment; and so they

occasion no pain, but the greatest pleasure, to the mortal part

of the soul, as is manifest in the case of perfumes. But things

which are changed all of a sudden, and only gradually and with

difficulty return to their own nature, have effects in every way

opposite to the former, as is evident in the case of burnings and

cuttings of the body.

Thus have we discussed the general affections of the whole body,

and the names of the agents which produce them. And now I will

endeavour to speak of the affections of particular parts, and the

causes and agents of them, as far as I am able. In the first

place let us set forth what was omitted when we were speaking of

juices, concerning the affections peculiar to the tongue. These

too, like most of the other affections, appear to be caused by

certain contractions and dilations, but they have besides more of

roughness and smoothness than is found in other affections; for

whenever earthy particles enter into the small veins which are

the testing instruments of the tongue, reaching to the heart, and

fall upon the moist, delicate portions of flesh—when, as they are

dissolved, they contract and dry up the little veins, they are

astringent if they are rougher, but if not so rough, then only

harsh. Those of them which are of an abstergent nature, and purge

the whole surface of the tongue, if they do it in excess, and so

encroach as to consume some part of the flesh itself, like potash

and soda, are all termed bitter. But the particles which are

deficient in the alkaline quality, and which cleanse only

moderately, are called salt, and having no bitterness or

roughness, are regarded as rather agreeable than otherwise.

Bodies which share in and are made smooth by the heat of the

mouth, and which are inflamed, and again in turn inflame that

which heats them, and which are so light that they are carried

upwards to the sensations of the head, and cut all that comes in

their way, by reason of these qualities in them, are all termed

pungent. But when these same particles, refined by putrefaction,

enter into the narrow veins, and are duly proportioned to the

particles of earth and air which are there, they set them

whirling about one another, and while they are in a whirl cause

them to dash against and enter into one another, and so form

hollows surrounding the particles that enter—which watery vessels

of air (for a film of moisture, sometimes earthy, sometimes pure,

is spread around the air) are hollow spheres of water; and those

of them which are pure, are transparent, and are called bubbles,

while those composed of the earthy liquid, which is in a state of

general agitation and effervescence, are said to boil or

ferment—of all these affections the cause is termed acid. And

there is the opposite affection arising from an opposite cause,

when the mass of entering particles, immersed in the moisture of

the mouth, is congenial to the tongue, and smooths and oils over

the roughness, and relaxes the parts which are unnaturally

contracted, and contracts the parts which are relaxed, and

disposes them all according to their nature;—that sort of remedy

of violent affections is pleasant and agreeable to every man, and

has the name sweet. But enough of this.

The faculty of smell does not admit of differences of kind; for

all smells are of a half-formed nature, and no element is so

proportioned as to have any smell. The veins about the nose are

too narrow to admit earth and water, and too wide to detain fire

and air; and for this reason no one ever perceives the smell of

any of them; but smells always proceed from bodies that are damp,

or putrefying, or liquefying, or evaporating, and are perceptible

only in the intermediate state, when water is changing into air

and air into water; and all of them are either vapour or mist.

That which is passing out of air into water is mist, and that

which is passing from water into air is vapour; and hence all

smells are thinner than water and thicker than air. The proof of

this is, that when there is any obstruction to the respiration,

and a man draws in his breath by force, then no smell filters

through, but the air without the smell alone penetrates.

Wherefore the varieties of smell have no name, and they have not

many, or definite and simple kinds; but they are distinguished

only as painful and pleasant, the one sort irritating and

disturbing the whole cavity which is situated between the head

and the navel, the other having a soothing influence, and

restoring this same region to an agreeable and natural condition.

In considering the third kind of sense, hearing, we must speak of

the causes in which it originates. We may in general assume sound

to be a blow which passes through the ears, and is transmitted by

means of the air, the brain, and the blood, to the soul, and that

hearing is the vibration of this blow, which begins in the head

and ends in the region of the liver. The sound which moves

swiftly is acute, and the sound which moves slowly is grave, and

that which is regular is equable and smooth, and the reverse is

harsh. A great body of sound is loud, and a small body of sound

the reverse. Respecting the harmonies of sound I must hereafter

speak.

There is a fourth class of sensible things, having many intricate

varieties, which must now be distinguished. They are called by

the general name of colours, and are a flame which emanates from

every sort of body, and has particles corresponding to the sense

of sight. I have spoken already, in what has preceded, of the

causes which generate sight, and in this place it will be natural

and suitable to give a rational theory of colours.

Of the particles coming from other bodies which fall upon the

sight, some are smaller and some are larger, and some are equal

to the parts of the sight itself. Those which are equal are

imperceptible, and we call them transparent. The larger produce

contraction, the smaller dilation, in the sight, exercising a

power akin to that of hot and cold bodies on the flesh, or of

astringent bodies on the tongue, or of those heating bodies which

we termed pungent. White and black are similar effects of

contraction and dilation in another sphere, and for this reason

have a different appearance. Wherefore, we ought to term white

that which dilates the visual ray, and the opposite of this is

black. There is also a swifter motion of a different sort of fire

which strikes and dilates the ray of sight until it reaches the

eyes, forcing a way through their passages and melting them, and

eliciting from them a union of fire and water which we call

tears, being itself an opposite fire which comes to them from an

opposite direction—the inner fire flashes forth like lightning,

and the outer finds a way in and is extinguished in the moisture,

and all sorts of colours are generated by the mixture. This

affection is termed dazzling, and the object which produces it is

called bright and flashing. There is another sort of fire which

is intermediate, and which reaches and mingles with the moisture

of the eye without flashing; and in this, the fire mingling with

the ray of the moisture, produces a colour like blood, to which

we give the name of red. A bright hue mingled with red and white

gives the colour called auburn (Greek). The law of proportion,

however, according to which the several colours are formed, even

if a man knew he would be foolish in telling, for he could not

give any necessary reason, nor indeed any tolerable or probable

explanation of them. Again, red, when mingled with black and

white, becomes purple, but it becomes umber (Greek) when the

colours are burnt as well as mingled and the black is more

thoroughly mixed with them. Flame-colour (Greek) is produced by a

union of auburn and dun (Greek), and dun by an admixture of black

and white; pale yellow (Greek), by an admixture of white and

auburn. White and bright meeting, and falling upon a full black,

become dark blue (Greek), and when dark blue mingles with white,

a light blue (Greek) colour is formed, as flame-colour with black

makes leek green (Greek). There will be no difficulty in seeing

how and by what mixtures the colours derived from these are made

according to the rules of probability. He, however, who should

attempt to verify all this by experiment, would forget the

difference of the human and divine nature. For God only has the

knowledge and also the power which are able to combine many

things into one and again resolve the one into many. But no man

either is or ever will be able to accomplish either the one or

the other operation.

These are the elements, thus of necessity then subsisting, which

the creator of the fairest and best of created things associated

with himself, when he made the self-sufficing and most perfect

God, using the necessary causes as his ministers in the

accomplishment of his work, but himself contriving the good in

all his creations. Wherefore we may distinguish two sorts of

causes, the one divine and the other necessary, and may seek for

the divine in all things, as far as our nature admits, with a

view to the blessed life; but the necessary kind only for the

sake of the divine, considering that without them and when

isolated from them, these higher things for which we look cannot

be apprehended or received or in any way shared by us.

Seeing, then, that we have now prepared for our use the various

classes of causes which are the material out of which the

remainder of our discourse must be woven, just as wood is the

material of the carpenter, let us revert in a few words to the

point at which we began, and then endeavour to add on a suitable

ending to the beginning of our tale.

As I said at first, when all things were in disorder God created

in each thing in relation to itself, and in all things in

relation to each other, all the measures and harmonies which they

could possibly receive. For in those days nothing had any

proportion except by accident; nor did any of the things which

now have names deserve to be named at all—as, for example, fire,

water, and the rest of the elements. All these the creator first

set in order, and out of them he constructed the universe, which

was a single animal comprehending in itself all other animals,

mortal and immortal. Now of the divine, he himself was the

creator, but the creation of the mortal he committed to his

offspring. And they, imitating him, received from him the

immortal principle of the soul; and around this they proceeded to

fashion a mortal body, and made it to be the vehicle of the soul,

and constructed within the body a soul of another nature which

was mortal, subject to terrible and irresistible

affections,—first of all, pleasure, the greatest incitement to

evil; then, pain, which deters from good; also rashness and fear,

two foolish counsellors, anger hard to be appeased, and hope

easily led astray;—these they mingled with irrational sense and

with all-daring love according to necessary laws, and so framed

man. Wherefore, fearing to pollute the divine any more than was

absolutely unavoidable, they gave to the mortal nature a separate

habitation in another part of the body, placing the neck between

them to be the isthmus and boundary, which they constructed

between the head and breast, to keep them apart. And in the

breast, and in what is termed the thorax, they encased the mortal

soul; and as the one part of this was superior and the other

inferior they divided the cavity of the thorax into two parts, as

the women’s and men’s apartments are divided in houses, and

placed the midriff to be a wall of partition between them. That

part of the inferior soul which is endowed with courage and

passion and loves contention they settled nearer the head, midway

between the midriff and the neck, in order that it might be under

the rule of reason and might join with it in controlling and

restraining the desires when they are no longer willing of their

own accord to obey the word of command issuing from the citadel.

The heart, the knot of the veins and the fountain of the blood

which races through all the limbs, was set in the place of guard,

that when the might of passion was roused by reason making

proclamation of any wrong assailing them from without or being

perpetrated by the desires within, quickly the whole power of

feeling in the body, perceiving these commands and threats, might

obey and follow through every turn and alley, and thus allow the

principle of the best to have the command in all of them. But the

gods, foreknowing that the palpitation of the heart in the

expectation of danger and the swelling and excitement of passion

was caused by fire, formed and implanted as a supporter to the

heart the lung, which was, in the first place, soft and

bloodless, and also had within hollows like the pores of a

sponge, in order that by receiving the breath and the drink, it

might give coolness and the power of respiration and alleviate

the heat. Wherefore they cut the air-channels leading to the

lung, and placed the lung about the heart as a soft spring, that,

when passion was rife within, the heart, beating against a

yielding body, might be cooled and suffer less, and might thus

become more ready to join with passion in the service of reason.

The part of the soul which desires meats and drinks and the other

things of which it has need by reason of the bodily nature, they

placed between the midriff and the boundary of the navel,

contriving in all this region a sort of manger for the food of

the body; and there they bound it down like a wild animal which

was chained up with man, and must be nourished if man was to

exist. They appointed this lower creation his place here in order

that he might be always feeding at the manger, and have his

dwelling as far as might be from the council-chamber, making as

little noise and disturbance as possible, and permitting the best

part to advise quietly for the good of the whole. And knowing

that this lower principle in man would not comprehend reason, and

even if attaining to some degree of perception would never

naturally care for rational notions, but that it would be led

away by phantoms and visions night and day,—to be a remedy for

this, God combined with it the liver, and placed it in the house

of the lower nature, contriving that it should be solid and

smooth, and bright and sweet, and should also have a bitter

quality, in order that the power of thought, which proceeds from

the mind, might be reflected as in a mirror which receives

likenesses of objects and gives back images of them to the sight;

and so might strike terror into the desires, when, making use of

the bitter part of the liver, to which it is akin, it comes

threatening and invading, and diffusing this bitter element

swiftly through the whole liver produces colours like bile, and

contracting every part makes it wrinkled and rough; and twisting

out of its right place and contorting the lobe and closing and

shutting up the vessels and gates, causes pain and loathing. And

the converse happens when some gentle inspiration of the

understanding pictures images of an opposite character, and

allays the bile and bitterness by refusing to stir or touch the

nature opposed to itself, but by making use of the natural

sweetness of the liver, corrects all things and makes them to be

right and smooth and free, and renders the portion of the soul

which resides about the liver happy and joyful, enabling it to

pass the night in peace, and to practise divination in sleep,

inasmuch as it has no share in mind and reason. For the authors

of our being, remembering the command of their father when he

bade them create the human race as good as they could, that they

might correct our inferior parts and make them to attain a

measure of truth, placed in the liver the seat of divination. And

herein is a proof that God has given the art of divination not to

the wisdom, but to the foolishness of man. No man, when in his

wits, attains prophetic truth and inspiration; but when he

receives the inspired word, either his intelligence is enthralled

in sleep, or he is demented by some distemper or possession. And

he who would understand what he remembers to have been said,

whether in a dream or when he was awake, by the prophetic and

inspired nature, or would determine by reason the meaning of the

apparitions which he has seen, and what indications they afford

to this man or that, of past, present or future good and evil,

must first recover his wits. But, while he continues demented, he

cannot judge of the visions which he sees or the words which he

utters; the ancient saying is very true, that ‘only a man who has

his wits can act or judge about himself and his own affairs.’ And

for this reason it is customary to appoint interpreters to be

judges of the true inspiration. Some persons call them prophets;

they are quite unaware that they are only the expositors of dark

sayings and visions, and are not to be called prophets at all,

but only interpreters of prophecy.

Such is the nature of the liver, which is placed as we have

described in order that it may give prophetic intimations. During

the life of each individual these intimations are plainer, but

after his death the liver becomes blind, and delivers oracles too

obscure to be intelligible. The neighbouring organ (the spleen)

is situated on the left-hand side, and is constructed with a view

of keeping the liver bright and pure,—like a napkin, always ready

prepared and at hand to clean the mirror. And hence, when any

impurities arise in the region of the liver by reason of

disorders of the body, the loose nature of the spleen, which is

composed of a hollow and bloodless tissue, receives them all and

clears them away, and when filled with the unclean matter, swells

and festers, but, again, when the body is purged, settles down

into the same place as before, and is humbled.

Concerning the soul, as to which part is mortal and which divine,

and how and why they are separated, and where located, if God

acknowledges that we have spoken the truth, then, and then only,

can we be confident; still, we may venture to assert that what

has been said by us is probable, and will be rendered more

probable by investigation. Let us assume thus much.

The creation of the rest of the body follows next in order, and

this we may investigate in a similar manner. And it appears to be

very meet that the body should be framed on the following

principles:—

The authors of our race were aware that we should be intemperate

in eating and drinking, and take a good deal more than was

necessary or proper, by reason of gluttony. In order then that

disease might not quickly destroy us, and lest our mortal race

should perish without fulfilling its end—intending to provide

against this, the gods made what is called the lower belly, to be

a receptacle for the superfluous meat and drink, and formed the

convolution of the bowels, so that the food might be prevented

from passing quickly through and compelling the body to require

more food, thus producing insatiable gluttony, and making the

whole race an enemy to philosophy and music, and rebellious

against the divinest element within us.

The bones and flesh, and other similar parts of us, were made as

follows. The first principle of all of them was the generation of

the marrow. For the bonds of life which unite the soul with the

body are made fast there, and they are the root and foundation of

the human race. The marrow itself is created out of other

materials: God took such of the primary triangles as were

straight and smooth, and were adapted by their perfection to

produce fire and water, and air and earth—these, I say, he

separated from their kinds, and mingling them in due proportions

with one another, made the marrow out of them to be a universal

seed of the whole race of mankind; and in this seed he then

planted and enclosed the souls, and in the original distribution

gave to the marrow as many and various forms as the different

kinds of souls were hereafter to receive. That which, like a

field, was to receive the divine seed, he made round every way,

and called that portion of the marrow, brain, intending that,

when an animal was perfected, the vessel containing this

substance should be the head; but that which was intended to

contain the remaining and mortal part of the soul he distributed

into figures at once round and elongated, and he called them all

by the name ‘marrow’; and to these, as to anchors, fastening the

bonds of the whole soul, he proceeded to fashion around them the

entire framework of our body, constructing for the marrow, first

of all a complete covering of bone.

Bone was composed by him in the following manner. Having sifted

pure and smooth earth he kneaded it and wetted it with marrow,

and after that he put it into fire and then into water, and once

more into fire and again into water—in this way by frequent

transfers from one to the other he made it insoluble by either.

Out of this he fashioned, as in a lathe, a globe made of bone,

which he placed around the brain, and in this he left a narrow

opening; and around the marrow of the neck and back he formed

vertebrae which he placed under one another like pivots,

beginning at the head and extending through the whole of the

trunk. Thus wishing to preserve the entire seed, he enclosed it

in a stone-like casing, inserting joints, and using in the

formation of them the power of the other or diverse as an

intermediate nature, that they might have motion and flexure.

Then again, considering that the bone would be too brittle and

inflexible, and when heated and again cooled would soon mortify

and destroy the seed within—having this in view, he contrived the

sinews and the flesh, that so binding all the members together by

the sinews, which admitted of being stretched and relaxed about

the vertebrae, he might thus make the body capable of flexion and

extension, while the flesh would serve as a protection against

the summer heat and against the winter cold, and also against

falls, softly and easily yielding to external bodies, like

articles made of felt; and containing in itself a warm moisture

which in summer exudes and makes the surface damp, would impart a

natural coolness to the whole body; and again in winter by the

help of this internal warmth would form a very tolerable defence

against the frost which surrounds it and attacks it from without.

He who modelled us, considering these things, mixed earth with

fire and water and blended them; and making a ferment of acid and

salt, he mingled it with them and formed soft and succulent

flesh. As for the sinews, he made them of a mixture of bone and

unfermented flesh, attempered so as to be in a mean, and gave

them a yellow colour; wherefore the sinews have a firmer and more

glutinous nature than flesh, but a softer and moister nature than

the bones. With these God covered the bones and marrow, binding

them together by sinews, and then enshrouded them all in an upper

covering of flesh. The more living and sensitive of the bones he

enclosed in the thinnest film of flesh, and those which had the

least life within them in the thickest and most solid flesh. So

again on the joints of the bones, where reason indicated that no

more was required, he placed only a thin covering of flesh, that

it might not interfere with the flexion of our bodies and make

them unwieldy because difficult to move; and also that it might

not, by being crowded and pressed and matted together, destroy

sensation by reason of its hardness, and impair the memory and

dull the edge of intelligence. Wherefore also the thighs and the

shanks and the hips, and the bones of the arms and the forearms,

and other parts which have no joints, and the inner bones, which

on account of the rarity of the soul in the marrow are destitute

of reason—all these are abundantly provided with flesh; but such

as have mind in them are in general less fleshy, except where the

creator has made some part solely of flesh in order to give

sensation,—as, for example, the tongue. But commonly this is not

the case. For the nature which comes into being and grows up in

us by a law of necessity, does not admit of the combination of

solid bone and much flesh with acute perceptions. More than any

other part the framework of the head would have had them, if they

could have co-existed, and the human race, having a strong and

fleshy and sinewy head, would have had a life twice or many times

as long as it now has, and also more healthy and free from pain.

But our creators, considering whether they should make a

longer-lived race which was worse, or a shorter-lived race which

was better, came to the conclusion that every one ought to prefer

a shorter span of life, which was better, to a longer one, which

was worse; and therefore they covered the head with thin bone,

but not with flesh and sinews, since it had no joints; and thus

the head was added, having more wisdom and sensation than the

rest of the body, but also being in every man far weaker. For

these reasons and after this manner God placed the sinews at the

extremity of the head, in a circle round the neck, and glued them

together by the principle of likeness and fastened the

extremities of the jawbones to them below the face, and the other

sinews he dispersed throughout the body, fastening limb to limb.

The framers of us framed the mouth, as now arranged, having teeth

and tongue and lips, with a view to the necessary and the good

contriving the way in for necessary purposes, the way out for the

best purposes; for that is necessary which enters in and gives

food to the body; but the river of speech, which flows out of a

man and ministers to the intelligence, is the fairest and noblest

of all streams. Still the head could neither be left a bare frame

of bones, on account of the extremes of heat and cold in the

different seasons, nor yet be allowed to be wholly covered, and

so become dull and senseless by reason of an overgrowth of flesh.

The fleshy nature was not therefore wholly dried up, but a large

sort of peel was parted off and remained over, which is now

called the skin. This met and grew by the help of the cerebral

moisture, and became the circular envelopment of the head. And

the moisture, rising up under the sutures, watered and closed in

the skin upon the crown, forming a sort of knot. The diversity of

the sutures was caused by the power of the courses of the soul

and of the food, and the more these struggled against one another

the more numerous they became, and fewer if the struggle were

less violent. This skin the divine power pierced all round with

fire, and out of the punctures which were thus made the moisture

issued forth, and the liquid and heat which was pure came away,

and a mixed part which was composed of the same material as the

skin, and had a fineness equal to the punctures, was borne up by

its own impulse and extended far outside the head, but being too

slow to escape, was thrust back by the external air, and rolled

up underneath the skin, where it took root. Thus the hair sprang

up in the skin, being akin to it because it is like threads of

leather, but rendered harder and closer through the pressure of

the cold, by which each hair, while in process of separation from

the skin, is compressed and cooled. Wherefore the creator formed

the head hairy, making use of the causes which I have mentioned,

and reflecting also that instead of flesh the brain needed the

hair to be a light covering or guard, which would give shade in

summer and shelter in winter, and at the same time would not

impede our quickness of perception. From the combination of

sinew, skin, and bone, in the structure of the finger, there

arises a triple compound, which, when dried up, takes the form of

one hard skin partaking of all three natures, and was fabricated

by these second causes, but designed by mind which is the

principal cause with an eye to the future. For our creators well

knew that women and other animals would some day be framed out of

men, and they further knew that many animals would require the

use of nails for many purposes; wherefore they fashioned in men

at their first creation the rudiments of nails. For this purpose

and for these reasons they caused skin, hair, and nails to grow

at the extremities of the limbs.

And now that all the parts and members of the mortal animal had

come together, since its life of necessity consisted of fire and

breath, and it therefore wasted away by dissolution and

depletion, the gods contrived the following remedy: They mingled

a nature akin to that of man with other forms and perceptions,

and thus created another kind of animal. These are the trees and

plants and seeds which have been improved by cultivation and are

now domesticated among us; anciently there were only the wild

kinds, which are older than the cultivated. For everything that

partakes of life may be truly called a living being, and the

animal of which we are now speaking partakes of the third kind of

soul, which is said to be seated between the midriff and the

navel, having no part in opinion or reason or mind, but only in

feelings of pleasure and pain and the desires which accompany

them. For this nature is always in a passive state, revolving in

and about itself, repelling the motion from without and using its

own, and accordingly is not endowed by nature with the power of

observing or reflecting on its own concerns. Wherefore it lives

and does not differ from a living being, but is fixed and rooted

in the same spot, having no power of self-motion.

Now after the superior powers had created all these natures to be

food for us who are of the inferior nature, they cut various

channels through the body as through a garden, that it might be

watered as from a running stream. In the first place, they cut

two hidden channels or veins down the back where the skin and the

flesh join, which answered severally to the right and left side

of the body. These they let down along the backbone, so as to

have the marrow of generation between them, where it was most

likely to flourish, and in order that the stream coming down from

above might flow freely to the other parts, and equalize the

irrigation. In the next place, they divided the veins about the

head, and interlacing them, they sent them in opposite

directions; those coming from the right side they sent to the

left of the body, and those from the left they diverted towards

the right, so that they and the skin might together form a bond

which should fasten the head to the body, since the crown of the

head was not encircled by sinews; and also in order that the

sensations from both sides might be distributed over the whole

body. And next, they ordered the water-courses of the body in a

manner which I will describe, and which will be more easily

understood if we begin by admitting that all things which have

lesser parts retain the greater, but the greater cannot retain

the lesser. Now of all natures fire has the smallest parts, and

therefore penetrates through earth and water and air and their

compounds, nor can anything hold it. And a similar principle

applies to the human belly; for when meats and drinks enter it,

it holds them, but it cannot hold air and fire, because the

particles of which they consist are smaller than its own

structure.

These elements, therefore, God employed for the sake of

distributing moisture from the belly into the veins, weaving

together a network of fire and air like a weel, having at the

entrance two lesser weels; further he constructed one of these

with two openings, and from the lesser weels he extended cords

reaching all round to the extremities of the network. All the

interior of the net he made of fire, but the lesser weels and

their cavity, of air. The network he took and spread over the

newly-formed animal in the following manner:—He let the lesser

weels pass into the mouth; there were two of them, and one he let

down by the air-pipes into the lungs, the other by the side of

the air-pipes into the belly. The former he divided into two

branches, both of which he made to meet at the channels of the

nose, so that when the way through the mouth did not act, the

streams of the mouth as well were replenished through the nose.

With the other cavity (i.e. of the greater weel) he enveloped the

hollow parts of the body, and at one time he made all this to

flow into the lesser weels, quite gently, for they are composed

of air, and at another time he caused the lesser weels to flow

back again; and the net he made to find a way in and out through

the pores of the body, and the rays of fire which are bound fast

within followed the passage of the air either way, never at any

time ceasing so long as the mortal being holds together. This

process, as we affirm, the name-giver named inspiration and

expiration. And all this movement, active as well as passive,

takes place in order that the body, being watered and cooled, may

receive nourishment and life; for when the respiration is going

in and out, and the fire, which is fast bound within, follows it,

and ever and anon moving to and fro, enters through the belly and

reaches the meat and drink, it dissolves them, and dividing them

into small portions and guiding them through the passages where

it goes, pumps them as from a fountain into the channels of the

veins, and makes the stream of the veins flow through the body as

through a conduit.

Let us once more consider the phenomena of respiration, and

enquire into the causes which have made it what it is. They are

as follows:—Seeing that there is no such thing as a vacuum into

which any of those things which are moved can enter, and the

breath is carried from us into the external air, the next point

is, as will be clear to every one, that it does not go into a

vacant space, but pushes its neighbour out of its place, and that

which is thrust out in turn drives out its neighbour; and in this

way everything of necessity at last comes round to that place

from whence the breath came forth, and enters in there, and

following the breath, fills up the vacant space; and this goes on

like the rotation of a wheel, because there can be no such thing

as a vacuum. Wherefore also the breast and the lungs, when they

emit the breath, are replenished by the air which surrounds the

body and which enters in through the pores of the flesh and is

driven round in a circle; and again, the air which is sent away

and passes out through the body forces the breath inwards through

the passage of the mouth and the nostrils. Now the origin of this

movement may be supposed to be as follows. In the interior of

every animal the hottest part is that which is around the blood

and veins; it is in a manner an internal fountain of fire, which

we compare to the network of a creel, being woven all of fire and

extended through the centre of the body, while the outer parts

are composed of air. Now we must admit that heat naturally

proceeds outward to its own place and to its kindred element; and

as there are two exits for the heat, the one out through the

body, and the other through the mouth and nostrils, when it moves

towards the one, it drives round the air at the other, and that

which is driven round falls into the fire and becomes warm, and

that which goes forth is cooled. But when the heat changes its

place, and the particles at the other exit grow warmer, the

hotter air inclining in that direction and carried towards its

native element, fire, pushes round the air at the other; and this

being affected in the same way and communicating the same

impulse, a circular motion swaying to and fro is produced by the

double process, which we call inspiration and expiration.

The phenomena of medical cupping-glasses and of the swallowing of

drink and of the projection of bodies, whether discharged in the

air or bowled along the ground, are to be investigated on a

similar principle; and swift and slow sounds, which appear to be

high and low, and are sometimes discordant on account of their

inequality, and then again harmonical on account of the equality

of the motion which they excite in us. For when the motions of

the antecedent swifter sounds begin to pause and the two are

equalized, the slower sounds overtake the swifter and then propel

them. When they overtake them they do not intrude a new and

discordant motion, but introduce the beginnings of a slower,

which answers to the swifter as it dies away, thus producing a

single mixed expression out of high and low, whence arises a

pleasure which even the unwise feel, and which to the wise

becomes a higher sort of delight, being an imitation of divine

harmony in mortal motions. Moreover, as to the flowing of water,

the fall of the thunderbolt, and the marvels that are observed

about the attraction of amber and the Heraclean stones,—in none

of these cases is there any attraction; but he who investigates

rightly, will find that such wonderful phenomena are attributable

to the combination of certain conditions—the non-existence of a

vacuum, the fact that objects push one another round, and that

they change places, passing severally into their proper positions

as they are divided or combined.

Such as we have seen, is the nature and such are the causes of

respiration,—the subject in which this discussion originated. For

the fire cuts the food and following the breath surges up within,

fire and breath rising together and filling the veins by drawing

up out of the belly and pouring into them the cut portions of the

food; and so the streams of food are kept flowing through the

whole body in all animals. And fresh cuttings from kindred

substances, whether the fruits of the earth or herb of the field,

which God planted to be our daily food, acquire all sorts of

colours by their inter-mixture; but red is the most pervading of

them, being created by the cutting action of fire and by the

impression which it makes on a moist substance; and hence the

liquid which circulates in the body has a colour such as we have

described. The liquid itself we call blood, which nourishes the

flesh and the whole body, whence all parts are watered and empty

places filled.

Now the process of repletion and evacuation is effected after the

manner of the universal motion by which all kindred substances

are drawn towards one another. For the external elements which

surround us are always causing us to consume away, and

distributing and sending off like to like; the particles of

blood, too, which are divided and contained within the frame of

the animal as in a sort of heaven, are compelled to imitate the

motion of the universe. Each, therefore, of the divided parts

within us, being carried to its kindred nature, replenishes the

void. When more is taken away than flows in, then we decay, and

when less, we grow and increase.

The frame of the entire creature when young has the triangles of

each kind new, and may be compared to the keel of a vessel which

is just off the stocks; they are locked firmly together and yet

the whole mass is soft and delicate, being freshly formed of

marrow and nurtured on milk. Now when the triangles out of which

meats and drinks are composed come in from without, and are

comprehended in the body, being older and weaker than the

triangles already there, the frame of the body gets the better of

them and its newer triangles cut them up, and so the animal grows

great, being nourished by a multitude of similar particles. But

when the roots of the triangles are loosened by having undergone

many conflicts with many things in the course of time, they are

no longer able to cut or assimilate the food which enters, but

are themselves easily divided by the bodies which come in from

without. In this way every animal is overcome and decays, and

this affection is called old age. And at last, when the bonds by

which the triangles of the marrow are united no longer hold, and

are parted by the strain of existence, they in turn loosen the

bonds of the soul, and she, obtaining a natural release, flies

away with joy. For that which takes place according to nature is

pleasant, but that which is contrary to nature is painful. And

thus death, if caused by disease or produced by wounds, is

painful and violent; but that sort of death which comes with old

age and fulfils the debt of nature is the easiest of deaths, and

is accompanied with pleasure rather than with pain.

Now every one can see whence diseases arise. There are four

natures out of which the body is compacted, earth and fire and

water and air, and the unnatural excess or defect of these, or

the change of any of them from its own natural place into

another, or—since there are more kinds than one of fire and of

the other elements—the assumption by any of these of a wrong

kind, or any similar irregularity, produces disorders and

diseases; for when any of them is produced or changed in a manner

contrary to nature, the parts which were previously cool grow

warm, and those which were dry become moist, and the light become

heavy, and the heavy light; all sorts of changes occur. For, as

we affirm, a thing can only remain the same with itself, whole

and sound, when the same is added to it, or subtracted from it,

in the same respect and in the same manner and in due proportion;

and whatever comes or goes away in violation of these laws causes

all manner of changes and infinite diseases and corruptions. Now

there is a second class of structures which are also natural, and

this affords a second opportunity of observing diseases to him

who would understand them. For whereas marrow and bone and flesh

and sinews are composed of the four elements, and the blood,

though after another manner, is likewise formed out of them, most

diseases originate in the way which I have described; but the

worst of all owe their severity to the fact that the generation

of these substances proceeds in a wrong order; they are then

destroyed. For the natural order is that the flesh and sinews

should be made of blood, the sinews out of the fibres to which

they are akin, and the flesh out of the clots which are formed

when the fibres are separated. And the glutinous and rich matter

which comes away from the sinews and the flesh, not only glues

the flesh to the bones, but nourishes and imparts growth to the

bone which surrounds the marrow; and by reason of the solidity of

the bones, that which filters through consists of the purest and

smoothest and oiliest sort of triangles, dropping like dew from

the bones and watering the marrow. Now when each process takes

place in this order, health commonly results; when in the

opposite order, disease. For when the flesh becomes decomposed

and sends back the wasting substance into the veins, then an

over-supply of blood of diverse kinds, mingling with air in the

veins, having variegated colours and bitter properties, as well

as acid and saline qualities, contains all sorts of bile and

serum and phlegm. For all things go the wrong way, and having

become corrupted, first they taint the blood itself, and then

ceasing to give nourishment to the body they are carried along

the veins in all directions, no longer preserving the order of

their natural courses, but at war with themselves, because they

receive no good from one another, and are hostile to the abiding

constitution of the body, which they corrupt and dissolve. The

oldest part of the flesh which is corrupted, being hard to

decompose, from long burning grows black, and from being

everywhere corroded becomes bitter, and is injurious to every

part of the body which is still uncorrupted. Sometimes, when the

bitter element is refined away, the black part assumes an acidity

which takes the place of the bitterness; at other times the

bitterness being tinged with blood has a redder colour; and this,

when mixed with black, takes the hue of grass; and again, an

auburn colour mingles with the bitter matter when new flesh is

decomposed by the fire which surrounds the internal flame;—to all

which symptoms some physician perhaps, or rather some

philosopher, who had the power of seeing in many dissimilar

things one nature deserving of a name, has assigned the common

name of bile. But the other kinds of bile are variously

distinguished by their colours. As for serum, that sort which is

the watery part of blood is innocent, but that which is a

secretion of black and acid bile is malignant when mingled by the

power of heat with any salt substance, and is then called acid

phlegm. Again, the substance which is formed by the liquefaction

of new and tender flesh when air is present, if inflated and

encased in liquid so as to form bubbles, which separately are

invisible owing to their small size, but when collected are of a

bulk which is visible, and have a white colour arising out of the

generation of foam—all this decomposition of tender flesh when

intermingled with air is termed by us white phlegm. And the whey

or sediment of newly-formed phlegm is sweat and tears, and

includes the various daily discharges by which the body is

purified. Now all these become causes of disease when the blood

is not replenished in a natural manner by food and drink but

gains bulk from opposite sources in violation of the laws of

nature. When the several parts of the flesh are separated by

disease, if the foundation remains, the power of the disorder is

only half as great, and there is still a prospect of an easy

recovery; but when that which binds the flesh to the bones is

diseased, and no longer being separated from the muscles and

sinews, ceases to give nourishment to the bone and to unite flesh

and bone, and from being oily and smooth and glutinous becomes

rough and salt and dry, owing to bad regimen, then all the

substance thus corrupted crumbles away under the flesh and the

sinews, and separates from the bone, and the fleshy parts fall

away from their foundation and leave the sinews bare and full of

brine, and the flesh again gets into the circulation of the blood

and makes the previously-mentioned disorders still greater. And

if these bodily affections be severe, still worse are the prior

disorders; as when the bone itself, by reason of the density of

the flesh, does not obtain sufficient air, but becomes mouldy and

hot and gangrened and receives no nutriment, and the natural

process is inverted, and the bone crumbling passes into the food,

and the food into the flesh, and the flesh again falling into the

blood makes all maladies that may occur more virulent than those

already mentioned. But the worst case of all is when the marrow

is diseased, either from excess or defect; and this is the cause

of the very greatest and most fatal disorders, in which the whole

course of the body is reversed.

There is a third class of diseases which may be conceived of as

arising in three ways; for they are produced sometimes by wind,

and sometimes by phlegm, and sometimes by bile. When the lung,

which is the dispenser of the air to the body, is obstructed by

rheums and its passages are not free, some of them not acting,

while through others too much air enters, then the parts which

are unrefreshed by air corrode, while in other parts the excess

of air forcing its way through the veins distorts them and

decomposing the body is enclosed in the midst of it and occupies

the midriff; thus numberless painful diseases are produced,

accompanied by copious sweats. And oftentimes when the flesh is

dissolved in the body, wind, generated within and unable to

escape, is the source of quite as much pain as the air coming in

from without; but the greatest pain is felt when the wind gets

about the sinews and the veins of the shoulders, and swells them

up, and so twists back the great tendons and the sinews which are

connected with them. These disorders are called tetanus and

opisthotonus, by reason of the tension which accompanies them.

The cure of them is difficult; relief is in most cases given by

fever supervening. The white phlegm, though dangerous when

detained within by reason of the air-bubbles, yet if it can

communicate with the outside air, is less severe, and only

discolours the body, generating leprous eruptions and similar

diseases. When it is mingled with black bile and dispersed about

the courses of the head, which are the divinest part of us, the

attack if coming on in sleep, is not so severe; but when

assailing those who are awake it is hard to be got rid of, and

being an affection of a sacred part, is most justly called

sacred. An acid and salt phlegm, again, is the source of all

those diseases which take the form of catarrh, but they have many

names because the places into which they flow are manifold.

Inflammations of the body come from burnings and inflamings, and

all of them originate in bile. When bile finds a means of

discharge, it boils up and sends forth all sorts of tumours; but

when imprisoned within, it generates many inflammatory diseases,

above all when mingled with pure blood; since it then displaces

the fibres which are scattered about in the blood and are

designed to maintain the balance of rare and dense, in order that

the blood may not be so liquefied by heat as to exude from the

pores of the body, nor again become too dense and thus find a

difficulty in circulating through the veins. The fibres are so

constituted as to maintain this balance; and if any one brings

them all together when the blood is dead and in process of

cooling, then the blood which remains becomes fluid, but if they

are left alone, they soon congeal by reason of the surrounding

cold. The fibres having this power over the blood, bile, which is

only stale blood, and which from being flesh is dissolved again

into blood, at the first influx coming in little by little, hot

and liquid, is congealed by the power of the fibres; and so

congealing and made to cool, it produces internal cold and

shuddering. When it enters with more of a flood and overcomes the

fibres by its heat, and boiling up throws them into disorder, if

it have power enough to maintain its supremacy, it penetrates the

marrow and burns up what may be termed the cables of the soul,

and sets her free; but when there is not so much of it, and the

body though wasted still holds out, the bile is itself mastered,

and is either utterly banished, or is thrust through the veins

into the lower or upper belly, and is driven out of the body like

an exile from a state in which there has been civil war; whence

arise diarrhoeas and dysenteries, and all such disorders. When

the constitution is disordered by excess of fire, continuous heat

and fever are the result; when excess of air is the cause, then

the fever is quotidian; when of water, which is a more sluggish

element than either fire or air, then the fever is a tertian;

when of earth, which is the most sluggish of the four, and is

only purged away in a four-fold period, the result is a quartan

fever, which can with difficulty be shaken off.

Such is the manner in which diseases of the body arise; the

disorders of the soul, which depend upon the body, originate as

follows. We must acknowledge disease of the mind to be a want of

intelligence; and of this there are two kinds; to wit, madness

and ignorance. In whatever state a man experiences either of

them, that state may be called disease; and excessive pains and

pleasures are justly to be regarded as the greatest diseases to

which the soul is liable. For a man who is in great joy or in

great pain, in his unreasonable eagerness to attain the one and

to avoid the other, is not able to see or to hear anything

rightly; but he is mad, and is at the time utterly incapable of

any participation in reason. He who has the seed about the spinal

marrow too plentiful and overflowing, like a tree overladen with

fruit, has many throes, and also obtains many pleasures in his

desires and their offspring, and is for the most part of his life

deranged, because his pleasures and pains are so very great; his

soul is rendered foolish and disordered by his body; yet he is

regarded not as one diseased, but as one who is voluntarily bad,

which is a mistake. The truth is that the intemperance of love is

a disease of the soul due chiefly to the moisture and fluidity

which is produced in one of the elements by the loose consistency

of the bones. And in general, all that which is termed the

incontinence of pleasure and is deemed a reproach under the idea

that the wicked voluntarily do wrong is not justly a matter for

reproach. For no man is voluntarily bad; but the bad become bad

by reason of an ill disposition of the body and bad education,

things which are hateful to every man and happen to him against

his will. And in the case of pain too in like manner the soul

suffers much evil from the body. For where the acid and briny

phlegm and other bitter and bilious humours wander about in the

body, and find no exit or escape, but are pent up within and

mingle their own vapours with the motions of the soul, and are

blended with them, they produce all sorts of diseases, more or

fewer, and in every degree of intensity; and being carried to the

three places of the soul, whichever they may severally assail,

they create infinite varieties of ill-temper and melancholy, of

rashness and cowardice, and also of forgetfulness and stupidity.

Further, when to this evil constitution of body evil forms of

government are added and evil discourses are uttered in private

as well as in public, and no sort of instruction is given in

youth to cure these evils, then all of us who are bad become bad

from two causes which are entirely beyond our control. In such

cases the planters are to blame rather than the plants, the

educators rather than the educated. But however that may be, we

should endeavour as far as we can by education, and studies, and

learning, to avoid vice and attain virtue; this, however, is part

of another subject.

There is a corresponding enquiry concerning the mode of treatment

by which the mind and the body are to be preserved, about which

it is meet and right that I should say a word in turn; for it is

more our duty to speak of the good than of the evil. Everything

that is good is fair, and the fair is not without proportion, and

the animal which is to be fair must have due proportion. Now we

perceive lesser symmetries or proportions and reason about them,

but of the highest and greatest we take no heed; for there is no

proportion or disproportion more productive of health and

disease, and virtue and vice, than that between soul and body.

This however we do not perceive, nor do we reflect that when a

weak or small frame is the vehicle of a great and mighty soul, or

conversely, when a little soul is encased in a large body, then

the whole animal is not fair, for it lacks the most important of

all symmetries; but the due proportion of mind and body is the

fairest and loveliest of all sights to him who has the seeing

eye. Just as a body which has a leg too long, or which is

unsymmetrical in some other respect, is an unpleasant sight, and

also, when doing its share of work, is much distressed and makes

convulsive efforts, and often stumbles through awkwardness, and

is the cause of infinite evil to its own self—in like manner we

should conceive of the double nature which we call the living

being; and when in this compound there is an impassioned soul

more powerful than the body, that soul, I say, convulses and

fills with disorders the whole inner nature of man; and when

eager in the pursuit of some sort of learning or study, causes

wasting; or again, when teaching or disputing in private or in

public, and strifes and controversies arise, inflames and

dissolves the composite frame of man and introduces rheums; and

the nature of this phenomenon is not understood by most

professors of medicine, who ascribe it to the opposite of the

real cause. And once more, when a body large and too strong for

the soul is united to a small and weak intelligence, then

inasmuch as there are two desires natural to man,—one of food for

the sake of the body, and one of wisdom for the sake of the

diviner part of us—then, I say, the motions of the stronger,

getting the better and increasing their own power, but making the

soul dull, and stupid, and forgetful, engender ignorance, which

is the greatest of diseases. There is one protection against both

kinds of disproportion:—that we should not move the body without

the soul or the soul without the body, and thus they will be on

their guard against each other, and be healthy and well balanced.

And therefore the mathematician or any one else whose thoughts

are much absorbed in some intellectual pursuit, must allow his

body also to have due exercise, and practise gymnastic; and he

who is careful to fashion the body, should in turn impart to the

soul its proper motions, and should cultivate music and all

philosophy, if he would deserve to be called truly fair and truly

good. And the separate parts should be treated in the same

manner, in imitation of the pattern of the universe; for as the

body is heated and also cooled within by the elements which enter

into it, and is again dried up and moistened by external things,

and experiences these and the like affections from both kinds of

motions, the result is that the body if given up to motion when

in a state of quiescence is overmastered and perishes; but if any

one, in imitation of that which we call the foster-mother and

nurse of the universe, will not allow the body ever to be

inactive, but is always producing motions and agitations through

its whole extent, which form the natural defence against other

motions both internal and external, and by moderate exercise

reduces to order according to their affinities the particles and

affections which are wandering about the body, as we have already

said when speaking of the universe, he will not allow enemy

placed by the side of enemy to stir up wars and disorders in the

body, but he will place friend by the side of friend, so as to

create health. Now of all motions that is the best which is

produced in a thing by itself, for it is most akin to the motion

of thought and of the universe; but that motion which is caused

by others is not so good, and worst of all is that which moves

the body, when at rest, in parts only and by some external

agency. Wherefore of all modes of purifying and re-uniting the

body the best is gymnastic; the next best is a surging motion, as

in sailing or any other mode of conveyance which is not

fatiguing; the third sort of motion may be of use in a case of

extreme necessity, but in any other will be adopted by no man of

sense: I mean the purgative treatment of physicians; for diseases

unless they are very dangerous should not be irritated by

medicines, since every form of disease is in a manner akin to the

living being, whose complex frame has an appointed term of life.

For not the whole race only, but each individual—barring

inevitable accidents—comes into the world having a fixed span,

and the triangles in us are originally framed with power to last

for a certain time, beyond which no man can prolong his life. And

this holds also of the constitution of diseases; if any one

regardless of the appointed time tries to subdue them by

medicine, he only aggravates and multiplies them. Wherefore we

ought always to manage them by regimen, as far as a man can spare

the time, and not provoke a disagreeable enemy by medicines.

Enough of the composite animal, and of the body which is a part

of him, and of the manner in which a man may train and be trained

by himself so as to live most according to reason: and we must

above and before all provide that the element which is to train

him shall be the fairest and best adapted to that purpose. A

minute discussion of this subject would be a serious task; but

if, as before, I am to give only an outline, the subject may not

unfitly be summed up as follows.

I have often remarked that there are three kinds of soul located

within us, having each of them motions, and I must now repeat in

the fewest words possible, that one part, if remaining inactive

and ceasing from its natural motion, must necessarily become very

weak, but that which is trained and exercised, very strong.

Wherefore we should take care that the movements of the different

parts of the soul should be in due proportion.

And we should consider that God gave the sovereign part of the

human soul to be the divinity of each one, being that part which,

as we say, dwells at the top of the body, and inasmuch as we are

a plant not of an earthly but of a heavenly growth, raises us

from earth to our kindred who are in heaven. And in this we say

truly; for the divine power suspended the head and root of us

from that place where the generation of the soul first began, and

thus made the whole body upright. When a man is always occupied

with the cravings of desire and ambition, and is eagerly striving

to satisfy them, all his thoughts must be mortal, and, as far as

it is possible altogether to become such, he must be mortal every

whit, because he has cherished his mortal part. But he who has

been earnest in the love of knowledge and of true wisdom, and has

exercised his intellect more than any other part of him, must

have thoughts immortal and divine, if he attain truth, and in so

far as human nature is capable of sharing in immortality, he must

altogether be immortal; and since he is ever cherishing the

divine power, and has the divinity within him in perfect order,

he will be perfectly happy. Now there is only one way of taking

care of things, and this is to give to each the food and motion

which are natural to it. And the motions which are naturally akin

to the divine principle within us are the thoughts and

revolutions of the universe. These each man should follow, and

correct the courses of the head which were corrupted at our

birth, and by learning the harmonies and revolutions of the

universe, should assimilate the thinking being to the thought,

renewing his original nature, and having assimilated them should

attain to that perfect life which the gods have set before

mankind, both for the present and the future.

Thus our original design of discoursing about the universe down

to the creation of man is nearly completed. A brief mention may

be made of the generation of other animals, so far as the subject

admits of brevity; in this manner our argument will best attain a

due proportion. On the subject of animals, then, the following

remarks may be offered. Of the men who came into the world, those

who were cowards or led unrighteous lives may with reason be

supposed to have changed into the nature of women in the second

generation. And this was the reason why at that time the gods

created in us the desire of sexual intercourse, contriving in man

one animated substance, and in woman another, which they formed

respectively in the following manner. The outlet for drink by

which liquids pass through the lung under the kidneys and into

the bladder, which receives and then by the pressure of the air

emits them, was so fashioned by them as to penetrate also into

the body of the marrow, which passes from the head along the neck

and through the back, and which in the preceding discourse we

have named the seed. And the seed having life, and becoming

endowed with respiration, produces in that part in which it

respires a lively desire of emission, and thus creates in us the

love of procreation. Wherefore also in men the organ of

generation becoming rebellious and masterful, like an animal

disobedient to reason, and maddened with the sting of lust, seeks

to gain absolute sway; and the same is the case with the

so-called womb or matrix of women; the animal within them is

desirous of procreating children, and when remaining unfruitful

long beyond its proper time, gets discontented and angry, and

wandering in every direction through the body, closes up the

passages of the breath, and, by obstructing respiration, drives

them to extremity, causing all varieties of disease, until at

length the desire and love of the man and the woman, bringing

them together and as it were plucking the fruit from the tree,

sow in the womb, as in a field, animals unseen by reason of their

smallness and without form; these again are separated and matured

within; they are then finally brought out into the light, and

thus the generation of animals is completed.

Thus were created women and the female sex in general. But the

race of birds was created out of innocent light-minded men, who,

although their minds were directed toward heaven, imagined, in

their simplicity, that the clearest demonstration of the things

above was to be obtained by sight; these were remodelled and

transformed into birds, and they grew feathers instead of hair.

The race of wild pedestrian animals, again, came from those who

had no philosophy in any of their thoughts, and never considered

at all about the nature of the heavens, because they had ceased

to use the courses of the head, but followed the guidance of

those parts of the soul which are in the breast. In consequence

of these habits of theirs they had their front-legs and their

heads resting upon the earth to which they were drawn by natural

affinity; and the crowns of their heads were elongated and of all

sorts of shapes, into which the courses of the soul were crushed

by reason of disuse. And this was the reason why they were

created quadrupeds and polypods: God gave the more senseless of

them the more support that they might be more attracted to the

earth. And the most foolish of them, who trail their bodies

entirely upon the ground and have no longer any need of feet, he

made without feet to crawl upon the earth. The fourth class were

the inhabitants of the water: these were made out of the most

entirely senseless and ignorant of all, whom the transformers did

not think any longer worthy of pure respiration, because they

possessed a soul which was made impure by all sorts of

transgression; and instead of the subtle and pure medium of air,

they gave them the deep and muddy sea to be their element of

respiration; and hence arose the race of fishes and oysters, and

other aquatic animals, which have received the most remote

habitations as a punishment of their outlandish ignorance. These

are the laws by which animals pass into one another, now, as

ever, changing as they lose or gain wisdom and folly.

We may now say that our discourse about the nature of the

universe has an end. The world has received animals, mortal and

immortal, and is fulfilled with them, and has become a visible

animal containing the visible—the sensible God who is the image

of the intellectual, the greatest, best, fairest, most

perfect—the one only-begotten heaven.